Product Description

Includes several never-before-seen private photos from the Kennedy Family Collection that are being published for the first time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #447339 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-15
• Released on: 2003-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 704 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys out of favor and discredited by charges of plagiarism, the door is open and the time is right for another serious, multigenerational history of America's most fabled clan. Newsday reporter Maier (Dr. Spock: An American Life) answers the need quite well with this fascinating account, which emphasizes the family's roots as Catholics and products of the Irish diaspora. Unlike Ed Klein's provocative The Kennedy Curse, this thoughtful study does not dwell on the sensational. Maier goes to the heart of the Kennedys' spiritual and tribal identity in order to define and explain a range of subplots within the family saga. For example, one sees Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's appeasement of the Nazis and his general insensitivity to the plight of Europe's Jews during the late 1930s in fuller colors than before when one realizes the context in which he operated and the tradition out of which he sprang, rich with ancient, profound and unapologetic anti-Semitism. (JPK also clung to the traditional Irish-Catholic bias against Great Britain.) Maier likewise supplies a masterful account of the culture and habits related to Boston's distinctly Irish-Catholic ward politics, first experienced by young JFK in 1946. And he goes on to explore conservative Catholic anger over JFK's moves to "appease"-in the opinion of the Jesuit magazine America-anti-Catholic bigots during the 1960 election. This is all very fertile ground seeded, to a great extent, with items quite rare in recent Kennedy scholarship: new information mingled with genuine insight. It's an admirable job overall. 32 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Just when you thought there was no way to write about the Kennedys from a new angle, Maier comes up with one. His take is to view the family through the green prism of Ireland and, by extension, to examine their relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. This makes for surprisingly fresh reading. Although many of the stories related here are familiar--Joe Kennedy's attempts to break into Brahmin society, the impact on the family of daughter Kathleen's penchant for Protestant men--Maier deepens the account by also bringing up less discussed incidents, such as Congressman John Kennedy's trip to Ireland (and Jackie's, four years after the assassination) and how both the Catholic faith and JFK's Irish heritage played integral parts at the president's funeral. Nor does the story end with the Camelot days. Jean Kennedy Smith, the eighth child in the family, served as ambassador to Ireland, and Bobby Kennedy's daughter, Courtney, married Paul Hill, wrongly imprisoned by the police for terrorism. This extremely readable biography not only examines one particular immigrant family but also sheds light on the larger story of Irish Americans from the early twentieth century onward. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A fascinating new perspective.... A valuable book because of it focus on influences other biographies have overlooked." -- - Houston Chronicle

Customer Reviews

Another Side of This Family
Professor Maier has documented a side of the Kennedys that many readers are quite unfamiliar with: their ongoing commitment to their religious heritage. As Maier writes, Americans are more comfortable with Kennedy's as power operators and libertines. The essential Catholic nature of these men and women, however, either bores us or makes us uncomfortable. Some liberals don't appreciate the Kennedys as Catholics because they dislike Catholicism itself. Many conservatives deny that the Kennedy's are Catholic because, for such critics, morality means sexual prudery. Maier is able to strike the proper balance in portraying Joseph, Sr., John F. Kennedy and Edward as committed, believing albeit flawed Catholics. Robert is correctly drawn as the most conventionally devout of the Kennedy males. This should not be a revelation to readers, but in a sense, it is. And the author makes one more very important and routinely ignored point: It is very significant that Americans have been unwilling to nominate (let alone elect) a Roman Catholic to the Presidency since John F. Kennedy, over 40 years ago. This work ranks as one of the best, most carefully-documented and readable of the hundreds of books published about this family.

Superb
Finally a book that places the Kennedys in the context of their Catholic faith. This is one of the finest biographies of the family and easily ranks alongside Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys". Avoid the horrendous documentary DVD of the same name.

Entertaining, Informative and Not a Rehash
While this is an excellent history of the Kennedy family, tracing its roots like few histories have done, this book is far more. The author neither shows a bias to adore this large, well-known clan nor does he show a disdain for them. He simply tells the story as it is and leaves the reader to his own conclusions.

The main thrust of the book is the family's dealings with the Catholic church. We learn what many have suspected, that the Kennedy family paid off the churches leaders, providing them with much personal and institutional wealth, for the benefit of various Kennedy family members --- for special treatment and services.

The book covers just about all family members who were helped by the Catholic hierarchy but, of course, it spends more time on JFK who benefited from payments made by his father on his behalf. But it goes on to the more recent affairs including marriage annulments of lesser family members.

While this clan is of much less importance than it once was --- indeed it is of little importance --- this history and the new revelations add a good deal of knowledge for the student of politics and religion and leaves us with a distaste and distrust of both.

Susanna K. Hutcheson
Owner & Executive Copy Director
Powerwriting.com LLC