McKeon’s delightful memories have been tucked away for 50 years, and thankfully, she has brought them out to share the...
In her first book, McKeon recounts her years of working for Jacqueline Kennedy.
In 1963, the author and her sister were brought from Ireland to New York City to find work as domestic servants. After a fairly miserable year with a difficult mistress, she learned about a position just available, working for “Madam.” It was the luckiest break of her life. Upon arriving at the impressive Fifth Avenue apartment house, she was shown into a parlor. While waiting, a young boy, John, and his dog came in and showed her tricks, establishing a friendship that would last for years. Her easy interaction with John was enough to secure a position as a personal assistant. She cleaned, mended, and ironed Madam’s clothes and, more importantly, filled in for the governess, Maud. McKeon’s story is one of so many young Irish girls in service, but her employer’s easy manner and kindness to her staff give the idea that there was little hardship. This certainly isn’t a tell-all exposing personal secrets of the Kennedy family. Her travels with the family to Cape Cod, New Jersey, and elsewhere induced great loyalty, and Madam returned her employees’ loyalty. Her kindness at family loss and generosity when the author married are the stuff of fairy tales. She was also very possessive, and many weekends and days off were cancelled because Madam needed her. When the author fell in love with a man in the building trades, he was invited to the Cape for the summer, helping on weekends as a handyman and joining in the touch football games. Even after she married, McKeon still worked for Mrs. Kennedy, just not as a live-in assistant. In a wonderfully readable narrative, she shares good and bad times with the family and their children, always faithfully protecting their privacy.
McKeon’s delightful memories have been tucked away for 50 years, and thankfully, she has brought them out to share the enchanting magic of Camelot with us all.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5894-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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