Customer Reviews

Jack: A Life Like No Other

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Geoffrey Perret presents a new look at the life of America's most beloved president; it is also "the first craddle to grave biography" of this intricate personality. While the book is worth reading for those who are looking for a single volume biography of Jack Kennedy, it is definitivley not the definitive life of JFK nor a top work of scholarship. It reads more like a big volume of Biography Magazine or any news weekly than a well written, well researched piece. It will entretain and you will learn something --the history parts are very good-, but it will not earn a place in history as Gilbert's or Jenkins biography of Churchill will do.
Nevertheless you should read this book. It is an easy read, very entretaining and revealing. Jack's sex-adiction, amazing ambition, relation to his imposing father, sense of destiny, will be exposed before your eyes. It makes you wonder about where character in our leaders went since then.

If you've never read Perret's books, you should know that he is simply a literary recycler. In other words, there is rarely anything new in his books, and in some past books, most notably his book on Ulysses Grant, there are some glaring errors that any author/historian and editor would be ashamed of.

This book is, however, a good read. In fact, while there's little that is new, there are pages here that are just as good as anything in a JFK biography. There's a grace to some of the writing in this book.

Sometimes I found myself cringing at some of his sources (Seymour Hersh's book comes to mind), but for the most part it's assembled well.

Despite the number of JFK books out there, there are few one volume titles out there. This might be a good place to start if that's what you're seeking.

The picture on the cover of this book pretty much conveys the portrait of John F. Kennedy contained within; and for this reason, I couldn't put it down. In fact, I really wonder if it is possible to write a boring book about JFK. This is a man who loved life and lived it to the hilt; and to his credit, Perrot has succeeded in conveying this.

It would have been helpful, however, if the book were not marred by misstatements of fact. Two stand out in my mind. In one part of the book, we are told that the Kennedys held a grudge against Lyndon Johnson because he had helped spread the rumor of JFK's Addison's disease atteh Democratic convention in 1956. Yet in another part of the book, Perrot gives the date (correctly) as 1960. In truth, in 1956 LBJ was announcing Texas' votes for JFK in the balloting for vice president, hailing him as the "fighting sailor who bears the scars of battle." This is a far cry from rumor-mongering, which LBJ did indeed engage in in 1960, when he was a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The most egregious error, however, is that Perrot has the Connallys sitting FACING the Kennedys in the limousine on that fateful day in November 1963, when it seemed that the world stood still and began shedding tears which continue to fall. When I read this, my first reaction was one of incredulity. For the images of that day are etched in the minds of so many people, including those like myself who, though living, were not old enough to remember JFK first-hand, that I cannot fathom how anyone who has seen the Zapruder film or the photos from that horrible event could get such a mundane fact so wrong.

It's the little things like this that make you wonder.

That being said, I would still recommend this book for someone who wants an idea of what it was like to have a man in the White House who, for all his faults and all his flaws, still managed...and manages still...to summon forth the very best of the country that he served so well.

JFK definitely lived one of the most amazing and interesting lives in history, you can't even invent a story with so much triumph and tragedy, but this book was a very incomplete and odd portrait of the man, I really don't know what to make of it. The author quotes JFK as saying things that are so out of character for him, and takes incidents that have been mentioned in other books and totally twists them around. The one example I can think of is when Mr. Perret relates a well known story about Jackie listening outside the bathroom door as JFK's in the tub and gossiping with a friend, in every other book they say that JFK got out of the tub, brought her into the room and gently scolded her in a teasing manner about promising not to listen to his conversations, but in Perret's book he says that JFK bolted out of the tub in a rage, grabbed Jackie, yanked her by the hair and screamed, "You f#@*ing b#@ch!" That just doesn't sound like JFK's usual behavior from everything I've read about him before, and nobody has ever told the story that way. In addition to an almost unrecognizable JFK, there are numerous factual errors and the whole tone of the book is very strange, it's almost like a tabloid retelling of JFK's life, there's no depth to it at all, just fragmented anecdotes about trivial things nobody cares about. Perret also makes ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims, including one about Jackie's alleged plan to move to Hollywood and become a film star! Come on! Where did he even come up with that story and how can anyone take him seriously? Especially knowing how shy Jackie was and how she shunned the spotlight, and later discouraged John Jr. from an acting career. He also recycles the old, never proven rumor about Joe's million dollar offer to Jackie and quotes her as saying, "The price goes up to twenty million if Jack brings home any venereal diseases from any of his sluts." Can anyone imagine Jackie saying that? Other books like Unfinished Life have already established, through medical records, that Kennedy had venereal disease since the 1940s, and that Jackie was well aware of it, so she obviously could never have said that to Joe, and I doubt anyone knows if that conversation ever even took place, because the only people who could tell us were Jackie and Joe, and of course they're dead, how convenient! Jack definitely had a life like no other, but you need to find some other book if you want to read about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Not for the research -- as many of the other reviewers and the footnotes section of the book attest, most of the information has been available to us in other forms. But for the insights and attitude. Perret seems intent on making Kennedy human, and he succeeds. Kennedy is at once a visionary legislator (one of the first advocates of abolishing the mandatory retirement age and an early friend to both labor and Israel) and a bored playboy/senator (if a bill didn't interest him, he couldn't be bothered with it). A reckless womanizer who didn't really care about the impact his escapades had on his wife or career, yet one of the first politicians to recognize the power of the women's vote. And perhaps it was his confidence in his own rampaging heterosexuality that made him so comfortable with homosexual men -- something not very common in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Most of all, Jack managed to balance overwhelming ambition and opportunism with a secret but very strong core of idealism and conscience. I wish Perret had been a bit more discerning in choosing his sources. (I mean, J. Randy Taraborelli and Seymour Hersh, for heaven's sake!) But this complaint did not detract from readability of the book. It left me feeling profoundly sad about what this nation lost nearly 40 years ago, and how different the world today would be if JFK, for all his myriad faults, had lived out his natural life.

Although some people have said some facts in the book are incorrect and they may be, I found JACK to be very entertaining. A great book for someone who wants a single edition Kennedy bio.

First off, I glanced through the photos in the center of the book..an obvious mistake is apparent in the photo of Rose Kennedy and her children..the youngest child in the photo was identified as daughter, Kathleen, when in fact it is Rosmary Kennedy sitting on Rose's lap with Joe Jr. and JFK! Then there is a photo of JFK in a pool with John Jr and some other children. The photo states that Caroline is sitting on nanny Maude Shaw's lap..I don't think it is, neither is the child John John in the photo either! It's not over yet..in a photo in Palm Beach, there is a group shot that says ..Jack poses...with friends and their dates.".when in fact one of the women is Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy! Lastly, the photo of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy deplaning at Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963..well the "face" on Mrs. Kennedy looks as if someone "painted" it..it is not her face at all!! ???????

The life of Jack Kennedy has been covered countless times in books, magazines and movies. Having made the transformation from assassinated president to tabloid favorite, one wonders if there is anything new to be learned about Kennedy, or if there is anything to be gained by buying Geoffrey Perret's book. If you're at all like me -- a fan of history, an admirer of JFK, but not too swayed by rose colored revisionism -- then this book will prove to be well worth the money. Perret starts at the beginning and fully explores the odd psychological uprbinging Kennedy experienced in a family that was extremely eccentric and neurotic -- quite a far cry from American royalty. He follows Kennedy through his pratfalls as a high school and college student, and laments on the never-ending health problems Kennedy ran into throughout his life. I, for one, never knew that our movie star president was often in a frail and precarious state. By the book's end, you walk away with a new appreciation for all of the complexities of Kennedy's character -- and there enough here to make Freud blink a few times -- and for the truly unique life that he led.

This book is a tell it like it is history of one of the most American lives in the past century. JFK is presented from start to finish as a man in a race against boredom and with a mindset for the whitehouse. The book interestingly gives several chapters to his early years(which were quite priviliged) and then focuses on his career one government position at a time. It is a truthful and blunt portrayal of his character and should be read by anyone who is interested to know what JFK was really like.

Mr. Perret somehow succeeded in writing an incredibly boring book about a man who lived an extrodinary life. The book is also marred by continuous misstatements of fact and poor research. To those looking for a good book on JFK, I advise you to take a look at Nigel Hamilton's "JFK: Reckless Youth" for illumination on his early life, Richard Reeves' "Profile in Power" for a broad look at his presidency, and Arthur Schlessinger Jr.'s "A Thousand Days" for an intimate look at his presidency that also gives you an excellent sense of who he was as a person. "Jack" isn't worth the time.