After Camelot

Starred review from February 27, 2012
Taraborrelli picks up where he left off in Jackie, Ethel, Joan, adding more revelatory portraits of the Kennedys during the past four decades. To document America’s “royal family,” he conducted interviews with family members and their intimates, such people as Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Oleg Cassini, Robert McNamara, Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and numerous confidential sources. He also relied heavily on the 40 years of personal correspondence between Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson. There’s a parade of triumphs and tragedies, along with an insider’s view of family dynamics in crises both public and private: financial negotiations before Jackie’s marriage to Onassis; family interference in Pat Kennedy and Peter Lawford’s troubled marriage; Ted Kennedy’s bad behavior at Chappaquiddick, and his support of Caroline’s abortive Senate run to carry on the “family dynasty.” Taraborrelli has a fine flair for turning dry facts into dramatic descriptions so that many oft-told stories take on a new perspective. Meticulous multilayered details breathe life into remarkable recreations of family gatherings throughout this superb “fly on the wall” survey of the Camelot clan. Photos. Agent: TK.

March 1, 2012
Taraborrelli (The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, 2009, etc.) continues the Kennedy family saga begun in Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (2000). We have met them before: the martyred president's widow Jackie, the cigar-smoking Eunice, the beloved paterfamilias Joseph, the mother Rose, the changed-man Bobby, Ted of Chappaquiddick, the raucous Ethel, etc. In this gossipy, admiring story of the Kennedys of Massachusetts in the four decades after Bobby's 1968 assassination, Taraborrelli celebrates the enduring appeal of America's royal family and rehashes the feuds, scandals and heartbreaks that have made them so human. Again and again, he shows the family closing ranks: "The Kennedys would do what they always did in such situations," he writes of Ted's crisis with the girl in the car on the bridge. "They would come together." This larger-than-life clan, striving to serve while grappling with the Kennedy "curse," certainly lends itself to soap opera (Jackie, Ethel, Joan became a TV mini-series), and Taraborrelli gathers every luscious detail of the scandals, arrests, affairs, overdoses and bad-boy antics that have marked the post-Camelot years. It's all here: Jackie's marriage negotiations with Aristotle Onassis, Ted picking up young women in bars with his sons, the dangerous ski game at Aspen that took Michael Kennedy's life, the interventions to halt young David Kennedy's drug abuse, William Kennedy Smith's trial on rape charges in Palm Beach and the deaths in recent years of Rosemary, Ted and Sargent Shriver. The author reveals the family's most intimate details, and some readers will wish the author had taken his cue from the Cape Cod photographer who stopped shooting pictures of 103-year-old Rose Kennedy: "She was so wasted away...it felt like an invasion of privacy to even photograph her." A big, juicy read for Kennedy fans.

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November 15, 2011

Taraborrelli's best-selling biographies cover the likes of Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe, but Jackie, Ethel, Joan is probably his biggest hit thus far. Here he ranges from Jackie's struggles after JFK's assassination to Eunice to the death of John Kennedy Jr. in a book that will likely be much in demand.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2012
We are a nation founded to a degree on antipathy to royalty. Yet Americans have frequently shown an attraction to the glitter and supposed majesty of royalty in other nations. Our own royal family, the Kennedys, continues to be an object of our fascination, even obsession, although it is almost a half-century since Camelot was aborted in Dallas. Taraborrelli, who previously profiled the Kennedy wives in Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (2000), approaches the family with a mixture of affection, respect, and realism. He strives, with some success, to convey both the joys and sorrows of individual family members. Ethel Kennedy, seen as particularly wounded, has struggled to endure both widowhood and the travails of her children. John Kennedy Jr., uncomfortable in the role of young prince, searched for a personal, productive niche. A common theme that unites most of these Kennedys is a continued sense of noblesse oblige, which steers them toward forms of public service. Despite a rather gossipy quality, this offers a revealing glimpse at the ongoing saga of this extraordinary family. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The author's track record for writing popular, slightly spicy celebrity bios should serve him well here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2012

Popular biographer and journalist Taraborrelli (Michael Jackson: The Madness, the Magic, the Whole Story) presents his second book on the Kennedy family after Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot. Through extensive interviews with Kennedy staffers, friends, and family members, he tells the intertwining personal stories of members of JFK's extended family up to Edward Kennedy's death in 2009. He fills out the saga with many flashbacks to years before 1968, providing a fuller picture than the subtitle implies. In 24 parts, most of them centered around one member of the clan, he keeps readers deeply engaged with a comfortable, almost novelistic, style including much dialog (although there are several pages of source notes at the back, the quoted conversations are not fully traced). Despite the story's many tragic angles, it's also one about family loyalty, joy, and closeness. VERDICT Taraborrelli shows what makes the Kennedy legacy so enduring. His book, not aimed at academics, will appeal both to those long fascinated with the Kennedys and those new to following them, as well as readers more generally interested in American political and social history over these years. [See Prepub Alert, 10/21/11.]--Laura Krier, California Digital Lib., Oakland

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.