Rethinking Kennedy: An Interpretive Biography

by Michael O'Brien

After an initial honeymoon with historians, in recent years John F. Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized, resulting in a wide variety of assessments of his presidency and his life. Michael O'Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, has distilled the findings of his heavily detailed biography of a few years ago into a compact life that touches on all the important issues and incorporates the findings and judgments of major works since the president's death. He offers nuanced interpretations of the influence of Kennedy's parents, his early life, his struggles with health problems, his intellectual development, his heroism in World War II, his House and Senate career, and the paramount moments of his presidency, including the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his stand on civil rights, tax policy, and other domestic matters.

Genres: Biography

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 2009

About the author

Various authors, various genres (not disambiguated)

Reviews

[Alan Braswell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rethinking Kennedy by Michael O'Brien is a good introduction to President Kennedy. The book is very short for a biography. Only 240 pages long with very short chapters dealing with John F. Kennedy's life before and during his presidency.
The majority of the chapters is filled with other Kennedy biographers or myths about what exactly occurred for example JFK sexual affairs or his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of the later, the author mentions on page 172 'They were offensive missiles, the kind the Soviets had promise to never install there."
The author in the chapter dealing with Khrushchev that the topic of the Soviets placing missiles in Cuba never comes up.

It has become a trend, of late, for biographers to not include any foot notes, end notes, or any other source material in the biography.
As is the case with; Rethinking Kennedy.
Is this habit an act of just laziness on the part of the author?
Michael O'Brien throughout the biography will have a quote from another source, list the person giving the quote, but nothing to indicate to the reader where the source material the author used.
It makes one believe that one can put any quote and affix someone's name to the quote and people will not take the author to task for either slander or outright lying.

[Kacper · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as nonfiction books go, this book wasn't that boring. It was nice and quick-paced! Kennedy dies at the end, you know ;'-(