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
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
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