A doorstop of a melodrama. Kennedy die-hards will love it.
The prolific celebrity biographer delivers another Kennedy family saga, this time focusing on the 29 individuals comprising the “third generation” of the famed clan.
In this sprawling post-Camelot account, Taraborrelli (Jackie, Janet & Lee: The Secret Lives of Janet Auchincloss and Her Daughters Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill, 2018, etc.) details the lives of the third generation—the grandchildren of Joe and Rose Kennedy—as they have tried to live up to Kennedy values (honor, family, loyalty) while failing to cope with the murders of John F. (1963) and Bobby (1968). Growing up in families that never discussed the assassinations among themselves and offered few healing mechanisms to their children, the young heirs often self-medicated with alcohol and drugs. Innumerable infidelities, confrontations, and divorces run through this soap opera, which teems with intimate views of angry, heavy-drinking matriarch Ethel, mother of Bobby’s 11 children; Ted, who kept the family together, and his wife, Joan, both “unpredictable, alcoholic parents”; and the smiling, seemingly happy children, who struggled inside, some wanting “anything other than to be Kennedys.” Taraborrelli rehashes Bobby’s son Michael’s affair with a 16-year-old babysitter; the murder conviction of Ethel’s nephew Michael Skakel; David Kennedy’s death by cocaine overdose; JFK Jr.’s death in a plane crash, and so on. “Terrible things have happened to the Kennedys,” writes the author, “sometimes by fate and circumstance, sometimes by their own volition.” Taraborrelli’s depictions of Caroline’s therapy as a child and the family’s expectation that Bobby Jr., who made drug runs to Harlem, would run for president, are unsettling. All of this is recounted against the glitz, wealth, and historical role of the family, the ever present paparazzi, the family pressure to excel, and the children’s careers in politics and other fields. No scandal or luxurious dining room goes overlooked.
A doorstop of a melodrama. Kennedy die-hards will love it.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-17406-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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