A well-researched but limited account of a year in the life of Jackie O.
A biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) focusing on a pivotal year in her life, 1975.
Former Boston Globe reporter and editor Cassidy (Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born, 2006) sets out to prove that Onassis, though arguably a socialite, was no dilettante—that her seemingly sudden decision to immerse herself in the worlds of literature and historical preservation was born of longstanding interest and expertise in both. The author uses 1975, the year in which Onassis was widowed for the second time, to examine this transformation from wife to activist and editor. Rather than creating focus, though, this lens often refracts. Cassidy includes detailed biographical information from earlier parts of her subject’s life in order to contextualize the choices she made during this pivotal year. Therefore, though that single year organizes the book, each of its significant events—her second husband’s death, her work as a consulting editor for Viking, her rejection of the political posts offered to her—is examined broadly, not deeply. For example, the chapter about her involvement in the campaign to maintain Grand Central Station’s status as a landmark site is as much about her restoration of the White House and her involvement in the preservation of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. Throughout, Cassidy is highly sympathetic to Onassis. She quotes Sally Quinn, a Washington Post writer who criticized Onassis in the fall of 1975 (“she is going literary-journalistic because…that’s where the glamour is, and the action”) and promptly dismisses her: “Quinn used the journalistic disguise of her own thoughts by inserting what ‘skeptics’ thought.” Cassidy offers no evidence for this assertion, leaving readers unable to determine whether or not Quinn was actually voicing a common criticism of the time.
A well-researched but limited account of a year in the life of Jackie O.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-199433-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
