This book kept my interest throughout, though I'm always skeptical of autobiographical pieces because I'm never quite sure whether the author - either consciously or unconsciously - is presenting history as he or she would like it to have been, rather than as it was.

One example: the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, famously subjected his retarded daughter, Rosemary, to a frontal lobotomy. Author Kennedy relates this as his father seeking an operation that purportedly would cure his daughter, and instead she was clearly totally incapacitated as a result. I've read several accounts about this traumatic event, and never has it been portrayed as an operation to cure her of her retardation. So I wonder if this is the only way Edward Kennedy could reconcile his father's actions as something other than opportunism to be able to institutionalize his daughter and keep her "imperfection" out of the limelight.

Nonetheless, Kennedy shed some light on personal history that was new to me, and he owned up to his faults.