A middling memoir that provides a few interesting glimpses into one member of the Kennedy clan who was almost lost to her...
Historical facts and family stories about the hidden life of Rosemary Kennedy (1918-2005).
Using research, family stories, and her own interactions with her subject, Koehler-Pentacoff (The ABCs of Writing for Children, 2003, etc.) examines the life of the third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Unlike her two older brothers, Rosie was a bit slow to develop. She was diagnosed as mentally disabled at the age of 7, but her parents rejected the idea of placing her in an institution and enlisted the entire family in helping raise her. With extra kindness, love, and help, they believed she could function in the world. But as Rosie grew older and more beautiful, she also became more rambunctious, sneaking out at night to meet men and have sex and throwing terrible tantrums when she was forced to stop. “Because of their high profile in politics and society,” the author writes, “the Kennedys couldn’t risk the shame of sexual disease or an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.” In 1941, “unbeknownst to his wife and family,” Joseph made the decision to have his daughter undergo a prefrontal lobotomy, which was supposed to “relieve her of the rages she suffered but also render her happy and content.” Unfortunately, the surgery left Rosie far worse than she had been. Joseph told the family she was being placed in a home run by nuns, and she was sent to live in Wisconsin, where her personal caretaker was the author’s aunt, Sister Paulus, who became a lifelong friend. With average prose, Koehler-Pentacoff flip-flops from one family to another, making the narrative a bit difficult to follow, but she does reveal an untold chapter in the Kennedy saga. She also delves into the different families’ histories of mental illness and shows how knowledge of Rosie’s disability led to the founding of the Special Olympics by Eunice Kennedy.
A middling memoir that provides a few interesting glimpses into one member of the Kennedy clan who was almost lost to her family.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61088-174-6
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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