JFK: Reckless Youth - Softcover

This Kennedy biography received considerable attention in text form earlier this year. Nigel Hamilton reads his own work with a neutrality that takes any sensationalism out of the text. The abridgment also contributes to this and focuses on the tragedies and dysfunction of the family. The title offers interesting background to a man who continues to fascinate America. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Riveting, impressively researched, at times shocking, this first in a multi-volume life of John F. Kennedy lays bare the bruised, narcissistic psyche behind his charismatic facade. In this volume we meet a fun-loving but emotionally confused youth, deeply affected by the loveless union between his bullying, demanding father, Joseph, and his sanctimonious, prudish mother, Rose--a woman JFK increasingly regarded with contempt. We see him become a 19-year-old aide to his father, who was U.S. ambassador to Britain from 1938 to 1940 and an arch appeaser of Hitler; we read how the son steps out from his father's shadow and reverses his own isolationist stance. We see him mature as commander of an ill-fated PT boat in the Pacific and learn of his love affair with Danish reporter Inga Arvad, an associate of Hitler and Goebbels, whom the FBI suspected of being a Nazi spy. We leave him at the end of this volume as congressman-elect in 1946, in the process of transforming himself into an unsavory politican for whom the chase was the challenge--with voters as with women. Hamilton ( The Brothers Mann ) has written a remarkably fresh work that promises to be the fullest, most revealing portrait of Kennedy's personal and political development. Photos. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.