Customer Reviews

Happy Times

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This was an incredible book filled with candid photographs of Lee Radziwill, her family and friends. Fortunately, you will recognize everyone in the book. The style and presentation are very mellow and you will be especially touched by the pictures of the people in Ms. Radziwill's life who were taken prematurely. The photographs of her with her children and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy, are wonderful and unposed. This book is a fantastic addition to my coffee table. You will enjoy it, too.

I found this book to be charming - it's like a scrapbook - very personal and offers a glimpse at this tragic and iconic family. I thought Lee Radziwill's drawings sweet - it's not meant to be some profound statement about the Kennedy's - it just captures the spirit of the moment. I think it's an unusual and highly evocative publication - worth buying despite what some other reviews have written!

You have to like, or at least be interested in Lee Radziwill in order to appreciate this book. You have to realize that it's a Lee Radziwill book, not a Jackie book, or a Kennedy book, or even a Truman Capote/ socialite circle book. Its title suits it perfectly. This book represents what we'd all like to have one day: a sparkling documentation of the happy times of our lives with no mention of, in Lee Radziwill's case, the considerable bad times. It's unfair to criticize this book for what it never was meant to be.
If you've read the DuBois biography, you will recognize a lot in this book. Unfortunately the DuBois biography focuses exclusively on the negative, documenting every last derogatory comment anyone ever made about Lee Radziwill. I think Happy Times proves that Lee Radzwill is far more graceful than the world seems to think.
This is a beautiful book. Great photography, creative format, interesting narrative. A real treasure!

This book is a rambling collection of photographs and memories from the life of Caroline Lee Bouvier Canfield Radziwell Ross. And with so many names, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that her life is spun off into many different directions and many different interests...

How wonderful a real autobiography from Lee Radziwell would have been. She's play a vital, albeit supporting, role in the "Camelot" saga that has fascinated the world for the past forty years. Her book, HAPPY TIMES, in a stingy peek into that world, and almost as frustrating as her recent bout of TV interviews with Barbara Walters (who I thought was going to throttle her for the lack of ANY information Lee gave during her interview last fall), Diane Sawyer and Larry King. She has so much to tell, yet hold so much back and ultimately frustrates even her most ardent supporters.

But, with three failed marriages, money woes and, most sadly, the premature death of her son, it's easy to fogive Lee her discretion. But that doesn't mean you have to buy this book.

Most of the photographs are very well known indeed, some of them are even public domain photos from the national archives. There are a lot of reprinted pictures of her decorating schemes for her various houses and an entire section lifted from her 1970's book ONE SPECIAL SUMMER, which is a little beyond the pale to just reprint a whole section of an earlier book and sell it as new.

Wish her well in her life, but don't buy this book.

What a treat to see inside someone's personal scrapbook and photo album. This book gives us that rare treat. Ms. Radizwill and her family have had a life full of great triumphs and great tragedy. In this book, she chooses to share with us the triumphs, or 'happy times' as she refers to them. This is a great book for admirers of Ms. Radziwill, the Kennedys, or admires of style and beauty. Thanks Ms. Radziwill for sharing this beautiful collection so memories.

As Ms Radziwill explains in her engagingly brief introduction to this "happy" book she feels no need to add to the mountain of words already written about her family. She has instead chosen a collection of photographs and other documents that remind her of life with Jackie and others (Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Oleg Cassini...) in the 60s. It is quite beautifully done and there is a strange mystery to the sequence of images with their brief and enigmatic hand written captions. It is almost hallucinatory; or perhaps like a location shoot for a yet to be filmed movie. I like this reading of the book as something haunting, magical and poetic. Some of the pictures (the corner of a deserted terrace in Ravello or a table set with food) have the sort of quality more usually associated with art photography. Did Ms Radziwill intend to convey this quality? I don't know but I think this book will be remembered for a long time.

What a disappointment this book proved to be. No real insights and certainly no new information about this shadowed sister or her famous relatives. Just endless pictures of Ms. Radziwill looking far away and dazed. Almost no pictures of 'you know who'. I returned it the same day I received it. The narrative is boring and the desire to understand this person better is very much left unsatisfied. Ms. Radziwill works so hard at maintaining her privacy that she fails to inform her readers of anthing that would be of real interest.

Having read IN HER SISTER'S SHADOW and knowing of Lee's past ventures, this seems to be the most successful of them. She has the rich lady's talent of putting together Louis XV rooms and arranging flowers, and she definitely has a wealth of pictures to cull from, but I thought she chose an odd lot to include here! And I wonder why some were enlarged while other lovely pictures (such as she and Tina on a Moroccan-looking bed) were so miniscule that you barely noticed them. (I've since seen the picture enlarged in DOMINO magazine, and it's mesmerizing). The book is indeed what she chooses to remember (though it's confusing to see how she could include pictures of Anthony without a little loving note to his memory--I suppose she prefers to remember the happy times when he was alive). I thought the pictures of John Kennedy were boring (I've seen these types 1000 times), but I loved the ones of Lee and Jackie on Christmas morning. They were glorious! I liked her inclusion of a page from her guest book (should be more of this kinda stuff), and I liked her pictures in couture through the years. But you do get the feeling that she's a little self-centered because everything was Lee, Lee, Lee. I loved the pictures of the interiors of her homes and the Italian home and the baptismal pictures. But I think the editing could have been a lot better, and I would've liked more commentary from Lee. Pictures from her brief acting stint would've been interesting too. Still, you will like this book if you love to look through photo albums and decorating magazines and Vogue. That's the feeling it gives you. The best part is the black and white pictures of Lee and Jackie (and their children). There's also a great picture of Lee going to a theater production of COCO in a great suit with her hair up. She is very pretty and the gloss comes through in the pictures. But some better choices could certainly have been made, IMO. I have bought and given away the book TWICE and am fixing to buy it again! I wish it would go to the "bargain books" section so I could buy more for gifts!

I just love to sit and look through this book because of its beautiful, unique photographs. There are several pictures of Jackie O throughout, but it is Lee's book and Lee herself and her friends are the primary focus. All of the pictures and text are interesting, but the best part of the book is the last section where Jackie and Lee's "One Special Summer" is published...this was the "book" they wrote and illustrated after a summer vacation.

I have to confess to being an addict to all things Kennedy and Jackie, especially. I bought this thinking it would be loaded with Jackie information, previously unknown. Well, I was wrong, but in the process I believe I got a truer image of her younger sister. I always had envisioned Lee living entirely, and jealously in her sister's shadow. It appears to me that after reading this book that we have done this woman a disservice. She has led a fabulous life in her own right. English estates, Beach Houses, cruising on Yachts. I found it interesting and I noted that Lee seems to have pretty impressive taste herself and was a little more conservative. (The Philadelphia Story Years notwithstanding) I was pleasantly surprised. I think it's time we allowed this woman her own space. Imagine being compared to your sister the First Lady for over half your life!