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John F. Kennedy

by Michael O'Brien

Our price: LBP 29,950Unavailable

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Overview
Readers reviews (5)

Product Details

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Publishing date: 16/05/2006
Language: English
ISBN-13: 9780312357450
ISBN: 0312357451

Synopsis

John F. Kennedy creates an absorbing, insightful and distinguished biography of one of America's most legendary Presidents. While current fashion in Kennedy scholarship is to deride the man's achievements, this book describes Kennedy's strengths, explains his shortcomings, and offers many new revelations.

There are many specialized books on Kennedy's career, but no first-class modern biography--one that takes advantage of the huge volume of recent books and articles and new material released by the JFK library. Ten years in the making, this is a balanced and judicious profile that goes beyond the clash of interpretations and offers a fresh, nuanced perspective.

Michael O’Brien is a retired professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley. His writing has earned top awards from Choice magazine, the Wisconsin Library Association, the National Catholic Press Association, and the Wisconsin Magazine of History.

John F. Kennedy creates an absorbing, insightful, and distinguished portrait of one of America's most legendary Presidents. While current fashion in Kennedy scholarship is to deride the man's achievements, this book describes Kennedy's strengths, explains his shortcomings, and offers many new revelations.

There are many specialized books on Kennedy's career, but no first-class modern biography?until now. This massive study takes advantage of the huge volume of recent books and articles about John Kennedy, and of the many new materials released by the JFK Library. Ten years in the making, this is a balanced and judicious profile that goes beyond the clash of interpretations to offer a fresh, nuanced perspective.

"'Where is the heart in the man?' a contemporary of John F. Kennedy asked, and more than four decades and several hundred books later, it remains a good question. Although Michael O'Brien never satisfactorily answers it, no one else has either, and his diligent, exhaustive, nearly thousand-page, decade-in-the-making biography provides more evidence that this intensely private man, who was so adept at compartmentalizing his friends and emotions, may have placed his heart in a lock box without a key."?Thurston Clarke, The Washington Post

"O'Brien . . . weighs the evidence, considers earlier authors' conclusions, and renders a judgment that is usually thoughtful and convincing . . . It may be rash to credit anyone with having the last word on anything, but it is difficult to imagine anyone improving on some of O'Brien's Solomonic rulings."?The Washington Post

"It will come as nothing less than a godsend to serious historians who thought they knew everything there was to know about America's most glamorous and intriguing president."?New York Post

"Having read nearly seventy-five books on the Kennedys, I doubted that another nine hundred-plus page biography could hold my interest. I was wrong. O'Brien has done an excellent job of researching and writing about the late president."?Alex Coffin, The Charlotte Observer

"Along with Herbert Parmet and Robert Dallek, Michael O'Brien has written the most comprehensive biography of John F. Kennedy. Prodigiously researched and lucidly written, it supersedes Dallek in its understanding of Kennedy's medical problems. By providing new insights, O'Brien also adds to our understanding of Kennedy's private and public life."?James N. Giglio, author of The Presidency of John F. Kennedy

"Professor Michael O'Brien has written a richly empathetic biography in which he faces square on the revisionist truths of the last decades and yet John F. Kennedy remains graced with the laurels of humanity."?Laurence Leamer, bestselling author of Sons of Camelot

"A sprawling, unwieldy, yet readable life of the fallen president. O'Brien professes to have spent more than ten years on this book, and there's no reason to doubt him: he cites just about every study and incidental work in the literature, and his own massive contribution sometimes slows to a real-time crawl as he describes key events in Kennedy's presidency . . . The best portions chronicle JFK's abbreviated presidency, showing how he allowed himself to be manipulated on the matter of Vietnam while gaining more solid knowledge of Cuba and the Soviet Union, and how the president, a sharp student of economics, tried to work magic with tax cuts that flew in the face of a wartime deficit, a condition that will seem familiar to readers today . . . [W]orthy, ambitious, and of much interest to students of recent US history."?Kirkus Reviews

"The prevailing feeling among many is that everything there is to know about John F. Kennedy is already known. Surely there have been so many books about his life?as a politician and as a man?that it's easy to feel overwhelmed. But O'Brien, taking advantage of new documentary material (including the recently archived correspondence of Joseph Kennedy and the papers of JFK's friend Le-Moyne Billings), has found a somewhat different focus on the familiar story and offers a balanced rejoinder to some of the harsher, revisionist biographies that have appeared in recent years . . . O'Brien does yeoman's work pulling together material from various sources for this complete overview . . . [R]eaders do see Kennedy evolve as a man and as a force in history. An up-to-date and substantial addition to the Kennedy shelves."?Booklist

"O'Brien, a retired historian and biographer of Joe Paterno, Theodore Hesburgh, Philip Hart, Vince Lombardi, and Joseph McCarthy, is well qualified to tackle the subject of JFK as a legend and a man. His biography excels at putting both areas into perspective. Initially, historians mainly wrote sympathetic accounts of the slain President?of his youthful vigor, intelligence, and inspiration. A genuine World War II hero and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, JFK married the ultimate glamorous, intelligent woman and had photogenic children to match. These 'Camelot' accounts have since been challenged by revisionists who seemingly have cracked the veneer of style over substance in the life of a playboy and serial adulterer during his two years and ten months as President. Yet if many scholars now rank him as only an average president, the general public continues to view him as one of the greatest. Despite Kennedy's immaturity, he emerges here as an active and flexible politician, like other great Presidents. Rather than uncover new facts, O'Brien brings balance to the life of the fallen hero of the Cold War, which is the major contribution of his well-written and empathetic biography."?Library Journal

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O'Brien's Biography on JFK is Excellent
From Amazon

This book on Kennedy is very well written and extremely informative. The details on his professional and personal life are intense. I highly recommend this book.

Excellent Biography on an Excellent
From Amazon

My fascination with John F Kennedy comes from when I first saw him riding down Lehigh Avenue in Philadelphia in 1959 when I was 9 years old. He was running for president back then. After he became president I used to like watching him on TV verbally sparring with news reporters. What a difference in how the "powder-puffs" we have today on TV avoid, hide and pretend we have no problems. I'm definitely no Democrat but JFK had a lot more courage, intellegence and insight than most of who you see on the scene today in political arenas. He had a specail way of moving people to action that just doesn't seem to exist anymore. Hopefully someone else will eventually come along again like him who actually becomes an excellent president. Maybe someone like Sarah Polin? I'm also a big fan of well-written biographies and found this book to be amazing. What I liked about this book is how different aspects of JFK's life were catagorized and separated so that you could gain a real insite to how John Kennedy must have looked at the world. I liked that the author did not spend very much time on his assassination since there are already too many theories, stories and legends about that unfortunate incident. JFK appears to have been the consumate listener which to me is probably why he was so smart about common sense aspects. He listened and did not want to block that part of life out since it does make a positive difference. And yes he liked the ladies (he was so charasmatically attractive does that surprise anyone?) and he seems to have taken his job as president seriously. He often went to the people whenever he needed to really get an important point across. Had he remained president that wind-bag who took over, president Johnson, would have went back to his ranch in Texas instead of helping to kill so many young people during Viet Nam. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a more realistic idea of who JFK was, what he was really about and what his principles really were.

John Kennedy
From Amazon

The 1960 election was one of the closest. John Kennedy was Catholic, and many voters were against him for that reason. Kennedy's critics still question whether the Vietnam War would have been fought had Nixon won. It may not have been. On the other hand, there may have been a nuclear war. We will never know. It is part of the controversy of those years. Kennedy is remembered for his moon speech to Congress in 1961: "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." In 1962, Kennedy confronted Khrushchev over Cuba. The U.S. could not allow Soviet missiles 100 miles off the Florida coast. John Kennedy and First Lady Jackie brought an elegance to the White House emulated by successors Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in 1963 is something America is still dealing with, like Pearl Harbor before it and 9/11 after it. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated Kennedy. Conspiracy theories are false. The grassy knoll is a figment of the imagination. Oswald was a loner and a misfit. He was a marksman. He shot Kennedy from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository as his motorcade passed below. He fled and hid in a theater but was quickly apprehended. Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald. He said he did it out of sympathy for Jackie. There was no reason not to believe him.

PUBLISHER'S GROTESQUE ACADEMIC IRRESPONSIBILITY CUTTING FOOTNOTES
From Amazon

This great biography was written by an academic historian who gathers and compares several sources, yet the publisher to cut costs cuts the footnotes, which are of essential and greatest interest. In our era of intellectual property and knowledge as commodity, the publisher did not wish to provide the reader with specific indications for further study through the footnotes. With the collapse of the Internet we may never know what amplifications and insights the author may have included in these footnotes, which were no doubt as exhaustive as the work itself. How could the once great St. Martin's have been so academically irresponsible for commercial purposes? It is as inexplicable as our once great nation's journey from the intelligent JFK to the solipsistic W.

Not as memorable as the man
From Amazon

I read this book after reading the Caro series on Lyndon Johnson and this book fell short of my expectations. I felt that too many facts and stories where thrown together without a supporting theme or purpose. Also, I thought a disproportionate amount of time was spent on Kennedy's private life.