Charles Wheeler
A President In Pain
John F Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-1963
By Robert Dalleck
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 838pp £25 order from our bookshop
WHY ANOTHER KENNEDY book? Facing up to the question in a preface, Robert Dallek tells us that much new material has surfaced since he embarked on his project some six years ago. Without trawling through upwards of a hundred books about JFK this is a difficult claim to test. But what is undeniablv new is Dallek’s detailed, gruesome, yet fascinating account of Kennedy’s stlectacular number of illnesses Ad the trouble he and his family I took to keep them secret.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.