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 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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