A doorstop of a melodrama. Kennedy die-hards will love it.
The prolific celebrity biographer delivers another Kennedy family saga, this time focusing on the 29 individuals comprising the “third generation” of the famed clan.
In this sprawling post-Camelot account, Taraborrelli (Jackie, Janet & Lee: The Secret Lives of Janet Auchincloss and Her Daughters Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill, 2018, etc.) details the lives of the third generation—the grandchildren of Joe and Rose Kennedy—as they have tried to live up to Kennedy values (honor, family, loyalty) while failing to cope with the murders of John F. (1963) and Bobby (1968). Growing up in families that never discussed the assassinations among themselves and offered few healing mechanisms to their children, the young heirs often self-medicated with alcohol and drugs. Innumerable infidelities, confrontations, and divorces run through this soap opera, which teems with intimate views of angry, heavy-drinking matriarch Ethel, mother of Bobby’s 11 children; Ted, who kept the family together, and his wife, Joan, both “unpredictable, alcoholic parents”; and the smiling, seemingly happy children, who struggled inside, some wanting “anything other than to be Kennedys.” Taraborrelli rehashes Bobby’s son Michael’s affair with a 16-year-old babysitter; the murder conviction of Ethel’s nephew Michael Skakel; David Kennedy’s death by cocaine overdose; JFK Jr.’s death in a plane crash, and so on. “Terrible things have happened to the Kennedys,” writes the author, “sometimes by fate and circumstance, sometimes by their own volition.” Taraborrelli’s depictions of Caroline’s therapy as a child and the family’s expectation that Bobby Jr., who made drug runs to Harlem, would run for president, are unsettling. All of this is recounted against the glitz, wealth, and historical role of the family, the ever present paparazzi, the family pressure to excel, and the children’s careers in politics and other fields. No scandal or luxurious dining room goes overlooked.
A doorstop of a melodrama. Kennedy die-hards will love it.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-17406-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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