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5 comments about JFK: Reckless Youth.

1. JFK RECKLESS YOUTH has only one drawback: It covers only the part of his life up to his election to Congress. Hamilton has promised two more volumes, but they have so far not appeared. That said, it is the only negative that can be said for this remarkable volume, for my money the best JFK bio anywhere (including the new but hardly impressive JFK: AN UNFINISHED LIFE by Robert Dallek). There isn't an aspect of Kennedy's life that goes unexplored. Hamilton, however, did not have the access to JFK's medical records that Dallek did -- therefore he probably did not realize how very serious JFK's health issues were. (Of course, he is writing about JFK's early life, when he was obviously a lot healthier than he was later.)

   What is made painfully clear here is that JFK became president not because of his parents, but frankly, in spite of them. It was the force of his intellect and personality, more than his father's money, that made him who he was. Hamilton spends a lot of time in comparisons between Joe Jr. (the heir apparent) and Jack, the second son. According to him, Joe Jr. was ponderous, prejudiced, hardworking but abrasive and often nasty, and in general, simply did not attract people to him as Jack did. Jack, on the other hand, for all his natural rebelliousness (almost certainly fed by his parents' endless hectoring and marital issues), had enormous charm, warmth and endless humor. Hamilton even uncovers evidence of a surprisingly tender heart and his attempts to hide his concern for his friends with sarcasm and wit. His friends note that he constantly looked for new friendships and never lost a friend, even when the friends treated him with less than kindness and respect. He was loyal to a fault.

   Hamilton does reserve tremendous ire (and who can blame him?) for JFK's parents, two of really the most awful parents it's possible to imagine. Rose was a mother who constantly went off and left her children with the help, never home even when her oldest children were babies, and was never, never affectionate or even perhaps very interested in them, due to her unending though silent opposition to her husband's abuse and philandering. While she inspected them daily for missing buttons or loose threads, she was completely uninvolved in their interests, games and problems. Their father Joe was, as Hamilton makes clear, good at only one thing: manipulating stocks in order to steal himself a fortune. Every other thing he tried, including banking, shipping, movies, politics and diplomacy, was a failure. (Joe was so unscrupulous that even during his stint as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, he had people buying stocks he had inside information about. It says something that when FDR appointed him the first chairman of the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission, and FDR's cabinet protested vigorously, FDR's answer was, "Set a thief to catch a thief.") What made Joe rather insidious (and this only in comparison to Rose) is that if he did have a good point, it was his genuine love for his children, misguided as his childrearing experience was. Unfortunately, he taught them to win at any cost and that women were to be treated with contempt and used like tissue. But because he expressed affection and care for them, even dropping his own work schedule to appear at their schools when Rose wrote letters but never bothered to visit her sons even when Jack was deathly ill in boarding school, Joe comes off as, ironically, the much better parent. He was loving and affectionate, though his affection came with a price: That they think as he thought and do as he did, which Jack simply rebelled against.

   Hamilton has to be commended for his sense of balance. While never shirking his responsibility to point out Jack's flaws, he is careful also to show from where they sprang -- the terrible, dysfunctional union of his parents and their awful sense of what raising a family meant. The children were socially isolated (partially because of his parents' desperation to enter Boston's WASP society while being Irish Catholics themselves), turning to each other for comfort and thus becoming close, but then separated when Rose decided she couldn't handle them anymore and sent them to boarding school, some as young as age eight.

   There is so much in this book that has value, but what I personally appreciate the most is Hamilton's constant underlying (though silent) thesis that Jack's gifts were so many that had he been born to different parents, he still would have been remarkably successful, yet probably been a less tormented and far less complex personality. For Hamilton sees his sexual yearnings as nothing less than looking for the love he missed in his mother, yet unable to express his need for it because of her coldness during his formative years and what that coldness did to his ability to express and receive affection.

   I could go on and go (actually, I have), but I do heartily recommend this. It's an absorbing read about the formation of a remarkable and pivotal personality in American history. I'd love to see the next volume -- imagine what he'd do with the marriage of Jack and Jackie? -- but must wait till he gets there. Meanwhile, this volume is a five-star, fifty-carat gem. Don't miss it.




2. Anyone who truly loves John Kennedy (as I do) owes it to themselves to delve deeper into the formation of the character of this fabulously flawed human being. Nigel Hamilton's minutely-detailed "JFK: Reckless Youth," which recounts Kennedy's early through his first run for Congress, is one helluva place to start.
   
   The myth of Camelot has suffered death by a thousand cuts -- shredded by the disclosure of presidential affairs, murder plots and political machinations. But while other celebrities have generated renewed interest and sympathy by openly airing dirt and scandal, the Kennedys have endlessly recycled the Camelot myth of the heroic young president slain before his time. Hamilton's book is the antidote to this pious tripe, serving up a John Kennedy fighting against (and sometimes embracing) forces that should have destroyed him. Young John Kennedy suffered from a mystery ailment that landed him in the hospital countless times. He courted disaster and scandal with a string of amours. He chose to fight the Japanese on a "plywood coffin" known as a PT boat rather than sit out the war in a safer place. He was saddled with a father whose pre-WWII appeasement policies undercut the national interest. Kennedy, from a young age, was one familiar with the knife's edge between life and death, learning to skate the blade with grace and aplomb. Hamilton exhaustively chronicles these episodes using interview material and an extraordinary trove of personal letters to and from Kennedy himself.
   
   It's a shame that the Kennedy family blocked Hamilton's access to additional JFK material. The next volumes would no doubt have shown the moral excesses and almost suicidal risk-taking increasing as JFK grew older. While this material might have threatened the maudlin serenity of Camelot, I would have welcomed the change. Paradoxically, my love and admiration for John Kennedy did not wane as I read the incredible details of his life. Instead, I was amazed that such an extraordinary, compassionate and visionary man arose from the chaos of a life lived as a constant roll of the dice.



3. Our fascination with JFK continues. Even now, there are still aspects of his life and career which remain hidden from public view.
   
   This book relies on meticulous research and avoids speculation. It acquaints us with a brutal and psychotically competitive family, an aloof and cold mother of too many children who accomodates her husband's self-centeredness by a peculiarly Catholic form of emotional abandonment. This remove, however, strikes her own children as collateral damage from her intended assault on her husband.
   
   A family of highly competitive people, with singular ambition. The theory is not hard to establish: the ambition is to attain mom's love (which is unattainable) and to impress dad.
   
   The story is archetypal of American in the mid-20th century. We achieved so much because of qualities of competition, ruthlessness and self-interest. We also learned to worship glamour and celebrity. Wasn't Kennedy the best-looking president by far?
   
   I never understood him better than after reading this book. I also believe that he was addicted to sex, and that we knew way too little about how to treat that addiction back then.



4. Excellent book...Still waiting for Mr. Hamilton to come out with his second volume. I highly recommend the movie starring Patrick Dempsey. Mr. Hamilton we are still waiting for volume 2...



5. In the description of this book it says, "-a book that will astonish, entertain, and inform all those interesed in the life of America's thirty-sixth president." John F. Kennedy was the 35th president not the 36th. I was doing a report on JFK and when i saw this i decided i obviously should not use this book!

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5 comments about Madonna (Nova Audio Books) (Nova Audio Books).

1. Andrew Morton will always be known as the guy who wrote a groundbreaking biography of Princess Di. And he will be known for nothing else, apparently. At least, he won't be remembered for "Madonna," a quickie biography that covers no new ground and -- horrors! -- makes a once-controversial pop icon... boring.
   
   Madonna Louisa Ciccone started off as a motherless child, whose mom (also called Madonna) died of breast cancer. But she rapidly turned from pitiful to outrageous, travelling to NYC to become a dancer. Instead, she became a blossoming singer, an aspiring actress, and one of the first big stars to grace MTV.
   
   But more than her music was the controversy that surrounded her: Madonna dated men such as Michael Jackson, JFK Jr., Prince, and then-hot rapper Vanilla Ice, and married actor Sean Penn, while still pursuing relationships with other men and women. After their tumultuous union fell apart, she created the then-shocking book "Sex," the peak of her sexually-charged career. But then her life took a more domestic turn, with children, marriage and religion (in about that order).
   
   It's not hard to have an opinion on Madonna -- either you love her or hate her. But if the only exposure to Madonna was through this book, it would be difficult to decide which. Morton paints Madonna in bland hues, describing her exploits, affairs and then-shocking concerts in the most uninspired prose imaginable. However, not once does he reveal anything new -- despite input from lovers and friends, Morton can only add detail to what people already knew.
   
   There are some interesting facets of her rise to stardom, particularly how she and her pals changed the NYC club life, and the odd details of her first recordings. For example, she wasn't pictured on her first album, in the hopes that she would be thought to be black. But once we get back to Madonna's personal life, things get dull.
   
   Morton himself seems to presume too much on his knowledge of Madonna: he constantly claims that she was miserable, depressed, et cetera. Apparently he disapproves of her wild past. Entertainingly, he claims that Madonna is just a "Catholic girl who wants to get married." If that is how "just Catholic girls" live, then I want to know why I'm not having that much fun.
   
   Yet, at the same time, he glosses over most of her present, peaceful, monogamous life -- when she gets involved with Guy Ritchie and has her second child, he loses interest and crams the last several years into a matter of pages. One would think that her first solid relationship and her children would be worthy of a little more attention.
   
   Nobody expected Pulitzer-worthy journalism in "Madonna." But surely Andrew Morton could have done better than a tepid recounting of what her fans already knew.



2. I really liked this book. I thought that the book was well written without a slant either way. It was really insightful
   to the ambition involved with achieving a goal.



3. Fiona Apple once sang "everybody wants to be Madonna but no one wants to pay the price". And the price Madonna/Madge PAID - Oh dear! Since her 1981/2 club hit "Everybody" to the very first video "Burning Up" ... no other female singer has been able to eclipse Madonna. Not Britney, Jessica, Pink, Alannis, J.Lo, etc... They have come close but Madonna is the genuine article for which no replica is possible. Madonna is the Patron Saint of Ambition. Nothing less. Her numerous incarnations and transformations keep us getting and intrigued.
   
   The teenage Madonna ate the whole Big Apple before becoming the Queen of the Pop World. And she inspired alot of fresh faced girls just out of high school to say YES to their dreams and have the courage of heart to jump on a plane to big cities all around the world, never looking back!
   
   When the 17 year old Madonna Ciccone ran off to New York in the summer of 1977 ... a cab driver dropped her off at Times Square, the center of everything. Now she remains in pop culture the epicentre of what it means to be cultural icon. She inspired the Spice Girls (based on various versions of herself), Sex and the City, and many other attempts to be versions of her.
   
   Madonna was once called the Gold Standard of Timeless Blonde Ambition. And it's obvious why. The material girl is still strong over 20 years later! She was born under one hell of a lucky star!



4. Andrew Morton's fascinating biography of Madonna is well researched and elegantly written. Her life has been thoroughly chronicled in several lesser biographies, but Mr Morton, during a candid interview with the Archbishop of Dublin, was given unprecedented access to a previously unpublished letter that related to the star's earliest attempt to unsuccessfully adopt from Ireland. Handwritten on parchment and in immaculate Gaelic script, it is a literary light illuminating Madonna's sincere desire to embrace not only the concept of adoption but also the selfless act itself. It is in stark contrast to the raunchy, erotically-energized Madonna seen in explicit videos and heard in steamy lyrics, and for the first time we are able to glean the 'real' Madonna; not the vixen of popular culture but a vulnerable woman in search of fulfilment. Morton himself describes the letter as 'a celebration of this saintly songbird's empathy and passion.' The poignant document, quoted on page 78, reads:
   
   'National Council for Adoption
   26 Kildare Street
   Dublin 2
   Ireland
   October 27 2003
   
   Dear Ms Madonna
   
   The National Council for Adoption would like to thank you for your recent enquiry expressing interest in adopting.
   
   Unfortunately, there are no 25-year-old Irish males registered with our organisation, and even if there were, we would be slightly hesitant to supply the '157 strong-shouldered, six-packed, sun-tanned, slow-loving, shamrock-shaking sugar-studs' that you so generously offered to nurture.
   
   To mitigate your undoubted disappointment, the Council has arranged for the Eveready Company to send you a truckload of AAAs and a download of Enya singing 'Batteries Are A Girl's Best Friend'.
   
   Yours sincerely
   
   Phil O'Pastry
   
   CEO National Council for Adoption
   Dublin'
   
   The pathos embodied in this unique correspondence brought a lump to my throat and a stye to my eye.



5. I quite enjoyed Andrew Morton's take on the life and career of Madonna. From her modest Italian-American upbringing, to her days as a dance major in Ann Arbor (who knew?), to her early days in New York (which sound like something out of "Rent"), the book's first half reads like a Horatio Alger success story. Once a recording contract and MTV come calling, her career trajectory is pure nostalgia for any kid of the '80s. You'll remember where you were when you first saw the video for "Lucky Star," first heard about (or saw) the MTV video music awards performance of "Like A Virgin," and recall the monstrosity of her marriage to Sean Penn. Most likely you didn't see her movies... I know I didn't... but her music will act as a soundtrack to her life and yours.
   
   What's not to love? Although I am not a particular fan of Madonna (Ray of Light and Confessions on the Dance Floor are two exceptions), her career is certainly interesting. And, like any icon, her life is connected to your life. That is what makes these bios fun.

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