RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewOther authors...have ably chronicled this epic saga, but none has told the tale of the 35th president’s formative years better or more thoroughly than the Harvard history professor Fredrik Logevall in JFK, ... A fastidiously diligent researcher, Logevall pays scrupulous attention to Jack’s prep school and college essays, including a close reading of the Harvard senior paper that became Kennedy’s first book ... From all the carefully marshaled evidence a picture emerges of an uncommonly curious, sometimes frivolous but increasingly earnest young man on his way to shaping an informed, cleareyed, unsentimental sense of the world and his nation’s place in it ... [a] richly detailed and instructive book ... Though crafted as a kind of bildungsroman, JFK delivers something more than the traditional story of the callow wastrel’s maturation into the admirable adult. Here phylogeny closely replicates ontogeny. John F. Kennedy’s individual journey of separation from his father’s isolationism tracked the progression of the United States in midcentury from peripheral international player to hegemon.
Jill Leovy
RaveThe Washington PostGhettoside, if there’s any justice, will be the most important book about urban violence in a generation. And in one of those rare moments of utter kismet, it has appeared just when we need it most ... Ghettoside should change our understanding of and the debate about what’s going on in our most troubled neighborhoods. They are not hopeless places filled with incurable problems. They are dealing as best they can with horrific conditions not of their making and mainly not under their control. The book should bring some much-needed balance to the current debate about what post-Ferguson policing should look like.
