What, at this late date, could possibly be added to the oft-told story of the Kennedy clan?
Quite a lot it develops. Indeed, Goodwin's lengthy but unfailingly engrossing version provides fresh insights on the family's three-generation rise from the mean streets of Boston's North End to the White House—and the struggle of 19th-century immigrants to make their way in a not altogether hospitable land of opportunity. Herself the granddaughter of Irish immigrants, the author (an LBJ biographer and sometime Harvard historian) had access to a wealth of previously unexamined source material, notably 150-odd cartons of personal papers belonging to Joe and Rose Kennedy. She also had the cooperation of the family and friends, including matriarch Rose, whose memories were refreshed by the long-lost records, which ranged from her own diaries through business documents and report cards for the nine Kennedy kids. Happily, Goodwin's familiarity breeds neither contempt nor blarney. She offers and interprets the facts of a peculiarly American saga in commendably evenhanded fashion. Her three-part narrative opens with the 1863 baptism of John Francis (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, who gained local fame and fortune as a Bay State poi; it closes with the inauguration of his grandson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as the 35th President of the US. At stage center, though, are Rose, Honey Fitz's first and favorite daughter (a deeply religious but, by Goodwin's account, worldly-wise woman), and her husband, Joseph Patrick Kennedy. The founding father, who amassed a considerable fortune as an archetypal outsider, earned a reputation for ruthlessness and philandering. But to his children, the author shows, this tough-minded man was an unstintingly devoted and proud parent. The final section of the text focuses on the golden girl and two sons who were reaching adulthood as their father transcended the establishment that never wholly accepted him by becoming FDR's ill-starred ambassador to the Court of St. James. Joe Jr., bearer of the family's aspirations, was killed in action toward the end of WW II, and the beloved Kathleen, who against parental wishes married out of her Catholic faith, died in a plane crash a few years after the war. The torch was thus passed to JFK, who accepted it, albeit with some misgivings, and tacitly assented to a new bond with his demanding father.
An obvious must for Kennedy buffs. But also an evocatively detailed account of great achievement and dashed hopes, which supports Hardy's bleak conclusion that character is fate. There are scores of illustrations, many of which look to be candids from family photo albums.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1986
ISBN: 0743201752
Page Count: 996
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
