PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewBunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend, by Meryl Gordon, is an astute and intriguing portrait of a celebrity who wasn’t famous outside her own milieu. Mellon was a gifted gardener with princely means and infallible taste: Her close friend Jacqueline Kennedy asked her to redesign the White House Rose Garden. This well-bred heiress was both shockingly extravagant and studiously understated … Mellon is possibly remembered less for what she did than for what was done to her in her dotage … Bunny Mellon was written with the Mellon family’s cooperation, so it’s not steaming with leering conjecture. Mostly, the biography documents unsettling contradictions.
Steven Watts
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe examination of Kennedy’s masculine mystique is essentially 'Profiles in Swagger,' a pop culture look at the manly sex appeal of Jack Kennedy as well as contemporaries like Hugh Hefner, Ben Bradlee, Ian Fleming and Frank Sinatra. Yet [it is] surprisingly engaging ... Watts isn’t exploring new ground or even a very novel theory as he cherry-picks material that supports his thesis. But it’s a measure of the Kennedy magic that the familiar still seems exotic ... good reading, but the mere fact of [its] publication points to a clandestine mythmaking machine so potent that Kennedy could live up to his own legend only by dying young.
Alexandra Zapruder
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...surprisingly engaging ... Zapruder is a gifted writer and storyteller who delicately unravels a minor mystery few people know or care about, but that she makes human, complex and quite interesting.
