Publicity for this book claims that until now there has been "no first-class modern biography that takes advantage of the huge volume of new material released from government archives and the JFK Library": somewhere there is a copywriter who missed Robert Dallek's magisterial and bestselling An Unfinished Life
(2003), Dallek having been the first Kennedy biographer since Doris Kearns Goodwin to enjoy full, unrestricted access to all materials in the Kennedy Library. That being said, retired University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley history professor O'Brien (Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi
) offers a serviceable consideration of JFK that's as much a survey of the literature as it is a biography. The majority of O'Brien's footnotes refer to published sources, and this is reflected in O'Brien's prose. For example, his chapter on PT-109 is full of quotations from and allusions to the writings and conclusions of such authors as Robert Donovan, Joan and Clay Blair, and Nigel Hamilton. The estimates and guesstimates of these writers, plus others, are measured and compared, and then O'Brien sums up with his own analysis of JFK's adventure in the Pacific. One thousand pages of this makes for a singularly inclusive—though at times exhausting—summary of JFK scholarship past and present. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW
. Agent, Scott Waxman.
(Mar. 15)
