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38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
All hype about John, little else, 7 Sep 2003
By A Customer
I'll be honest. I bought the book solely to read the "dirt" regarding the marriage of JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Guess what? There's not much of that here, and what there is comes at the end. First one has to wade through the history of the Kennedy ancestors, which is at times interesting, but mostly at turns boggling and boring. It's tough keeping them straight, what with the tendency to use the same names each generation. For the most part, I don't particularly care what those long-ago Kennedy's did; sure, it's intriguing to see the pattern of devil-may-care behavior that apparently started hundreds of years ago and continues to this day, but overall, a synopsis would've done the trick for me.Once the book moved into JFK's father's lifetime, it did become more readable, because I could relate Joseph Kennedy to figures I am more familiar with. There is some interesting history there, and it was good reading. He certainly seemed to be an arrogant man, and I pity his family, so caught up in his machinations that they had to turn off emotion and caution to please their father. Couple that with a mother bound in the tenets of her religion, and you have a volatile combination. Is the Kennedy family cursed? I'd say no more than what they make themselves. Examining each incident, if you will, on its own merit leads me to believe that in large part, many of the tragedies that have befallen the members over the years could have been avoided, or at least lessened. Unfortunately, I think that money, pride, arrogance, and outright worship by outsiders at times have created in some of the "Kennedy Clan" a sense of infallibility that makes them feel above the laws of God and man, when in fact they are just as human as the rest of us. It's trite to say that JFK, Jr. had potential to rise above this, to do what his father never got to, to perhaps "finish" what his father started, things like that, but I think that there is truth there somewhere. He was different, somehow, than the rest of his family, yet as we all know, still carried enough of whatever it is that led him to make one too many foolish choices. That is perhaps the greatest tragedy to befall the Kennedy family.
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