On the 25th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's death, syndicated columnist Rogers—an old friend of the Kennedys—offers a fond, adulatory remembrance of RFK as family man. Rogers makes clear that his memoir is a ``love story''— written with the cooperation of the Kennedy family—in which he declines to address the many sensationalized allegations that journalists have made against the family (although he gently asserts that RFK's alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe did not occur). Instead, the author tries ``to capture the essence of the character, curiosity, wit, honesty, and love of family that propelled a remarkable man.'' Rogers vividly depicts a deeply religious man, profoundly devoted to his country, wife, and many children. Through many anecdotes—some genuinely amusing (a particularly ludicrous image is of dignified historian Arthur Schlesinger, in dark suit and bow tie, being ``catapulted'' into a pool at a Kennedy party)—Rogers draws a crazy-quilt picture of the chaotic family home at Hickory Hill, Virginia, headed by doting parents, filled with rambunctious small children and exotic animals, frequented by the distinguished, and animated by an endless passion for excellence. There's little discussion here of RFK as public man, except for Rogers's certainty that, had he lived, Kennedy would have been elected President in 1968 and would have profoundly altered the course of recent American history. Rogers also presents the human side of Kennedy's rivalry with Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, showing the two to be strangely similar in many ways, but he doesn't probe into the ways that Kennedy, as as attorney general, pursued organized crime. Though generally lighthearted, the narrative takes melancholy turns with its account of RFK's severe depression after hearing of his brother's death, and with the author's eyewitness description of Kennedy's assassination after winning the 1968 California primary. A simple, affecting tribute, genuinely sentimental without descending into mawkishness.
Pub Date: June 5, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-017042-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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