A thoughtful effort to claim Bobby Kennedy for the conservative, but not necessarily right-wing, cause. In a combination of intellectual biography and moral/cultural analysis, first-time author Beran considers Kennedy as —the first post-Enlightenment American statesman,— a politician for whom public service was far more than a rhetorical device. An inheritor of the practical if unreflective politics of Harry Stimson and his Groton-educated peers, Kennedy, writes Beran, exhibited all the arrogance of his privileged class, lording it as a young man over servants and government employees. It was not until reaching middle age that Kennedy shed some of this arrogance; a moment of transformation, Beran writes in a fascinating aside, came when Mrs. Paul Mellon loaned Kennedy a copy of Edith Hamilton’s book The Greek Way, which inspired him to take an Athenian view of public service—a view that meant betraying some of the aspirations of his family. Beran takes an unabashedly moralistic view of politics, examining key terms like ’self-reliance— and the self-confidence that makes it possible; he considers Bobby Kennedy as a nearly Christ-like figure who walked among the poor as if wearing a hair shirt, who washed the feet of the suffering; he even finds room for a kind word for patriarch Joseph Kennedy, whom he deems a cunning but compassionate man. In all of this, Beran is utterly convincing, and he reminds us how much we lost when Bobby Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet 30 years ago. He is slightly less convincing when he enlists Kennedy in the neoconservative movement, Beran’s idea of which is more English than American, but he is correct in pointing out that —dissent is not the exclusive property of the left— and that it makes more sense to liken Kennedy to John Ruskin than to Che Guevara. Timed to coincide with the anniversary of RFK’s death, this is a fitting, substantial tribute to a great man. (History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: May 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18625-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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