Perhaps the most revealing biography yet of Jack Kennedy coming of age, up to his election to Congress in 1946. Hamilton (Monty, 1986, etc.) has made the most of interviews with JFK's closest surviving relatives and friends, newly opened FBI and medical files, and, most importantly, unusual access to the future President's often raunchy, irreverent letters. Hamilton's most sensational contention—that Kennedy contracted gonorrhea at Harvard—probably will distract attention from the rest of this serious, revelatory study. In Hamilton's telling, the Kennedys were the most dysfunctional family this side of The Prince of Tides, characterized by an unhealthy competitiveness and a clannish loyalty that left them suspicious of outsiders. Hamilton finds it no wonder that JFK became a narcissistic womanizer: Rose Kennedy, with her ``sterile, convent-school values'' and trips away from her philandering husband and brood of nine, left him starved for parental attention. Sometimes, such resort to pop psychology is too automatic in explaining Kennedy's actions (e.g., that JFK was not simply attracted to the beauty of a Danish-born reporter wrongly suspected of spying, but was seeking maternal warmth missing from his own life). But Hamilton gradually develops JFK in all his charm and intelligence, an American Prince Hal awakening to his destiny: A young man cracking jokes at agonizing physical pain that would depress anyone else; engaging in bawdy boarding-school high jinks; soaking up political knowledge at college; and emerging carefully from the shadow cast by bullying father Joe and the equally narrow- minded, doomed heir-apparent Joe, Jr. A well-rounded, compelling biography that points the way for future scholars and will leave readers eager for Hamilton's planned future volumes on JFK. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41216-6
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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