PositiveThe Wall Street JournalTackett’s quest to penetrate the surface of a senator who \'plays the power game\' is instructive in itself. He strives to be fair and give credit where due, and he chronicles his subject’s political career with admirable diligence and even a certain sympathy.
Neal Gabler
PanThe Wall Street JournalThe authors’ sources lean toward partisans and Kennedy family retainers whose reflections are entirely predictable ... Ted Kennedy deserves better. Mr. Gabler, in particular, sets a disconcerting tone with his introductory note that \'we live now within an immense and profound cruelty, in a resurgence of white supremacy and the vile hatreds of racism and nativism and misogyny and homophobia and Islamophobia, in an anti-intellectual farrago in which large portions of the public display an aversion to indisputable facts and regard hard science as subversive.\' Some readers will thrill to Mr. Gabler’s Manichaean rhetoric, and will enjoy the book’s compulsively mawkish prose...If you profit from that sort of writing, the 1,227 pages of Against the Wind await you.
John A. Farrell
MixedThe Wall Street JournalConventional ... Greatness is always a subjective judgment and, apart from the skillful exercise of power and premier celebrity status, any verdict on Kennedy is subject to qualifications ... No score is too trivial to settle, no epithet too scurrilous to avoid. The authors’ sources lean toward partisans ... Ted Kennedy deserves better.
Sarah Weinman
RaveThe Wall Street JournalAs Sarah Weinman recounts in compelling detail in Scoundrel, there was to be a second act to this tawdry drama, one in which Smith, briefly and implausibly, played the role of wronged man ... The appeal of certain incarcerated people to random artists and intellectuals is a fascinating subject, by no means separating liberals from conservatives, and Scoundrel keeps its sharp eye fixed on the appeal’s mystery. What, for example, led Smith’s erudite, 50-something editor at Knopf to succumb to his psychopathic charm and indulge his sexual fantasies?
Fredrik Logevall
MixedThe Wall Street Journal... in the long run, Mr. Logevall labors a little too strenuously to persuade readers that Kennedy was more than the product of his family’s privilege and his own ambition and modest talents as intellect and interpreter of the world. The facts of his evident sexual appeal are repeated, and repeated again, with undue emphasis; his undergraduate insights and gathering worldview in office are recorded in admiring abundance. JFK is replete with testimonials to his ample qualities, yet nearly all of them are post-mortem assessments from the Kennedy circle ... The legend, in other words, has been as hard for Mr. Logevall to penetrate, much less overcome, as for any of his predecessors in biography. One comes away from JFK suspecting that, the more detail we have of this truncated life, the less majestic it will appear to posterity.
Jia Lynn Yang
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThis is very much a journalist’s account. Ms. Yang is disturbed to learn that, until very recently, many prominent Americans held views on race, nationality and an ideal social order that we now consider distasteful. And while she is wise to confine her timeline to the past century, the history is imparted through the stories of political participants whose lives are now mostly forgotten or altogether too well known: John, Robert and Edward Kennedy. This can get a little tedious at times ... Ms. Yang’s framework, however, is instructive ... Ms. Yang, whose approach is admirably thorough if not always even-handed, is good at highlighting the cross-currents of policy in [the Cold War] era.
Henry Hemming
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Hemming, despite his willingness to doubt portions of the Stephenson fable, clearly wants to argue that Britain’s challenge to enlist American aid—and maneuver a reluctant public and President Roosevelt into a wartime alliance—was a formidable one, met only with the indispensable assistance of William Stephenson. But is this claim persuasive? In assessing the influence of networking, hidden persuasion and what would later be called disinformation, it’s not easy to quantify cause and effect or separate skill from luck. Stephenson was a smart operator and imaginative man and as a Canadian had a better ear for the American idiom than his masters in London. But would the United States have failed to meet Hitler’s challenge without him? The question answers itself ... Stephenson’s not-so-secret sales campaign on behalf of embattled Britain was astute and arguably legendary. But his product had the benefit of eager customers.
