From the Publisher
"When I wrote my first novel after several nonfiction works about politics, James Patterson lovingly lambasted me for infringing on his thriller territory. Now I know how he feels as he crosses into political nonfiction with this juicy and entertaining look at a family that continues to wield power and influence. He's too good—it isn't fair!" —Jake Tapper, CNN anchor and author of The Hellfire Club
Washington Post
A breezy history of the Kennedy family, from patriarch Joe Sr. in the 1920s to John Jr.’s plane crash in 1999. ‘In telling the family story, you can also tell the story of this country,’ Patterson says.”
Jake Tapper
[Patterson] crosses into political nonfiction with this juicy and entertaining look at a family that continues to wield power and influence.”
CNN anchor and author of The Hellfire Club Jake Tapper
When I wrote my first novel after several nonfiction works about politics, James Patterson lovingly lambasted me for infringing on his thriller territory. Now I know how he feels as he crosses into political nonfiction with this juicy and entertaining look at a family that continues to wield power and influence. He's too good—it isn't fair!
CNN anchor and New York Times bestselling author Jake Tapper
[Patterson] crosses into political nonfiction with this juicy and entertaining look at a family that continues to wield power and influence.”
Kirkus Reviews
2020-05-06
Humdrum history of the Kennedy clan.
Joseph Kennedy is reputed to have made some of his early fortune in bootlegging during Prohibition, a claim that scholars such as David Nasaw have painstakingly examined—and largely dismissed. Patterson and Fagen skip by the matter, though their book is chock full of other salacious and lurid moments. What is certain is that the patriarch himself wasn’t sure how much he was worth, protesting to his wife, “How could I tell you, when I didn’t know myself?” It’s possible he was shielding the figures for dark reasons, but not divorce. The Kennedys were devout Catholics, and even when Joseph, as a film studio executive, tried to convince his sometime lover Gloria Swanson to have a baby with him, he could be sure that his home life wouldn’t be disrupted. Not so the next generation. The central conceit of the book is that there really is something to what Ted Kennedy once wondered aloud—whether “a curse actually did hang over all the Kennedys,” à la the House of Atreus. Considering what happened—assassinations, accidental deaths, all sorts of misadventures and legal scrapes, and lashings of hubris—Ted’s remark has weight, even if, as the authors breathlessly report, he got caught up in a cheating scandal that put him two years behind in school. There’s not much of serious note that other biographers and historians haven’t addressed, and much better, and the authors’ intent often seems to be simply to shame their subjects: “ ‘Kennedys don’t fail,’ his uncle Ted tells him. Yet David has failed sobriety over and over.” “Trust me, that one is all smoke and mirrors,” says Ethel Kennedy of Carolyn Bessette. And so on—and on and on.
A tabloid-worthy approach to a subject that has filled many shelves with more substantial works.
