by Jan Pottker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2001
Well-researched, but vulgar and plodding.
Bloated, stumbling account of Janet Auchincloss, her family, and the social world that produced Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
It is certainly curious that for all of America’s obsession with its de facto queen, Jackie Kennedy, there has been so little said of the Queen Mother. This could be attributed to Janet Auchincloss’s social set, which shunned vulgar publicity, but today’s curious reader need no longer suffer in ignorance; Pottker (Crisis in Candyland, 1995) has dragged the woman, warts and all, into the spotlight. With the assistance of Auchincloss’s two sons and countless relatives and staff, Pottker moves from the roots of the Lee and Auchincloss families through the lives of Janet and Hughdie and the world that sheltered Jackie until she married Jack. The work is remarkably detailed—and surprisingly drear. Although for the most part (following a deadly pair of opening chapters), the story moves along at a steady clip, the author has hobbled the narrative with over-reporting, reducing her dramatic cast of characters—Black Jack Bouvier, iron-willed Janet, mercurial Jack and Jackie—to a collection of minutiae. From the very beginning, the author lacks discernment; it’s as if she determined to include every detail recorded in her research, from how Janet wore her stockings to the style of young Jackie’s headboards (they had cane inserts). Equal space is accorded to the story of Jackie’s second miscarriage and an account of the decor of Janet Jr.’s debutante ball. This is an odd editorial choice, but the author’s judgment moves from questionable to shocking when she informs us that immediately following JFK’s assassination, Jackie “used the bathroom and noticed, again, that she had her period.” Although Pottker has succeeded in evoking the wealth and lifestyle of her subjects, she has done little to bring their relationship to life.
Well-researched, but vulgar and plodding.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26607-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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