The Last Brother

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book. I Have No Idea Why It Is No Longer In Print.
Review: I read this book several years ago and loved it. I could not put it down once I started reading it. Author Joe McGinness admits that there are parts of the book where he is writing from the viewpoint of Ted Kennedy, even though he could not get a lot of direct information from him, but I did not hold that against him when I read this book. I learned a lot about the Kennedy family that I was not previously aware of before I read this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book. I Have No Idea Why It Is No Longer In Print.
Review: Joe McGinniss once was a good author. At the age of 25, he wrote "The Selling of the President, 1968," which has since become a classic, read in political science classes across the country. Then something happened. He couldn't live up to the expectations others had of him. His next book, "Heroes" parallels the breakdown of his personal life with his growing disenchantment with his heroes from the 60's. He concludes that book with the notion that the only figure he examined who came close to being a genuine "hero" was Ted Kennedy, and that Kennedy would be the subject of his next book. He wasn't. Instead, McGinniss left politics and started writing true crime stories. He was fairly successful in that genre, but returns to politics with "The Last Brother," the long awaited biography of Ted Kennedy. Amazingly, transparently, the whole point of this book is that Kennedy couldn't live up to people's expectations of him and became self-destructive as a result. The book essentially ends with Chappaquiddick, which happened in 1969, the same year "The Selling of the President" was published. But while that book may be been the culmination of its author's life, Chappaquiddick was only one story in Ted Kennedy's. Kennedy has been the most influential senator of the last 100 years and has had his greatest impact on the course of American history in the years since 1969. All that is only touched on by McGinniss, who is more concerned with using Kennedy as a stand-in for himself, and probably his whole generation. "Heroes" does it better, but Adam Clymer's new biography of Kennedy is far superior if you want to read about the senator.

Rating:
Summary: For sheer voyeurism
Review: This book is terrible. It is not journalism. It is not fiction. It is the worst of both.

Rating:
Summary: Mistitled But Well Worth Reading
Review: This is by no means a complete biography of Edward Kennedy. Though the book was written in 1993, it cuts off just after Chappaquiddick.

Rather, it is a biography of the Kennedy family with stress on Joe, Robert John and especially Ed.

I really liked the way the author spells out the internal and external conflicts within each of the brothers. And while his stories of Ed Kennedy are quite lurid, he also makes you feel sorry for the man. That is an extraordinary bit of writing and makes the book a great read.

Rating:
Summary: Mistitled But Well Worth Reading
Review: This is by no means a complete biography of Edward Kennedy. Though the book was written in 1993, it cuts off just after Chappaquiddick.

Rather, it is a biography of the Kennedy family with stress on Joe, Robert John and especially Ed.

I really liked the way the author spells out the internal and external conflicts within each of the brothers. And while his stories of Ed Kennedy are quite lurid, he also makes you feel sorry for the man. That is an extraordinary bit of writing and makes the book a great read.