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Rating: 
Summary: EXCELLENT! I WISH I'D HAD THIS IN ELEMENTARY & MIDDLE SCHOOL
Review: Judie Mills does an extraordinary job of presenting Robert Kennedy, his life and the issues he faced as a politician to a young audience. She gives an excellent, in-depth accounting of the man's early life, the experiences that shaped his character as a man. We see young Bobby, at age 4, hurling himself into the ocean, determined to teach himself how to swim. That experience follows him throughout his life and it is that single determined approach he appears to take on most stands. As an undergraduate, he doggedly pursues a place on the football field and as an adult, he doggedly pursues Teamsters and Mafiosi. In reading of his interrogation of the men he regarded as "foes," one can almost imagine a little Bobby superimposed on the face of the future Attorney General, flinging himself headlong into the ocean determined to swim. And swim he does in the face of the Rackets Committee (aka "Get [Jimmy]Hoffa Squad.") In 1965, Robert Kennedy, then a Senator undertakes another grueling challenge. A self admitted acrophobe, he along with Mt. Everestt climbers Barry Prather and Jim Whittaker scale Mt. Kennedy, a previously unscaled Canadian Mountain. One tracks his progress as he makes his way up that mountain, only to emerge victorious on March 27, 1965. The boy who taught himself to swim was revisited in the man who climbed that mountain. Robert Kennedy was my very first hero as a child and this is a book I would have LOVED! (I STILL have my 1968 copies of "Life" in re the assassination). His work with civil rights issues, Farmworkers, minorities and other disenfranchised persons certainly makes for interesting reading. This book does him a big service by portraying him in a very sympathetic light. Readers do come away with the feeling that the man was sincere in his efforts and the question is always left hanging -- what would the outcome of this world today be had this man lived to be elected president in 1968?
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