Taraborrelli (The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, 2009, etc.) continues the Kennedy family saga begun in Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (2000).
We have met them before: the martyred president’s widow Jackie, the cigar-smoking Eunice, the beloved paterfamilias Joseph, the mother Rose, the changed-man Bobby, Ted of Chappaquiddick, the raucous Ethel, etc. In this gossipy, admiring story of the Kennedys of Massachusetts in the four decades after Bobby’s 1968 assassination, Taraborrelli celebrates the enduring appeal of America’s royal family and rehashes the feuds, scandals and heartbreaks that have made them so human. Again and again, he shows the family closing ranks: “The Kennedys would do what they always did in such situations,” he writes of Ted’s crisis with the girl in the car on the bridge. “They would come together.” This larger-than-life clan, striving to serve while grappling with the Kennedy “curse,” certainly lends itself to soap opera (Jackie, Ethel, Joan became a TV mini-series), and Taraborrelli gathers every luscious detail of the scandals, arrests, affairs, overdoses and bad-boy antics that have marked the post-Camelot years. It’s all here: Jackie’s marriage negotiations with Aristotle Onassis, Ted picking up young women in bars with his sons, the dangerous ski game at Aspen that took Michael Kennedy’s life, the interventions to halt young David Kennedy’s drug abuse, William Kennedy Smith’s trial on rape charges in Palm Beach and the deaths in recent years of Rosemary, Ted and Sargent Shriver. The author reveals the family’s most intimate details, and some readers will wish the author had taken his cue from the Cape Cod photographer who stopped shooting pictures of 103-year-old Rose Kennedy: “She was so wasted away…it felt like an invasion of privacy to even photograph her.” A big, juicy read for Kennedy fans.
Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-55390-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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