South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Sweeping account of senator’s life
In his new biography of Ted Kennedy, John A. Farrell describes a letter Joseph Kennedy sent his youngest son telling the teenager he had to choose between a serious or nonserious life.
“I’ll still love you which ever choice you make,” the elder Kennedy wrote. “But if you decide to have a non-serious life, I won’t have much time for you.”
Kennedy certainly lived a serious life, Farrell’s sweeping biography “Ted Kennedy: A Life” makes clear. But Farrell is not afraid to examine complicated aspects of Kennedy’s life, which makes this biography worth the time of any reader interested in our nation’s political history.
Farrell, who examined a similarly complicated figure with his biography of Richard Nixon, is the perfect choice for chronicling Kennedy’s life.
The book explores how Kennedy’s grief over his brothers’ deaths, and the shadow it cast over his life motivated him, for good and bad.
This includes Kennedy’s fatal car accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 that killed Mary Jo Kopechne and the senator’s decision to wait hours after the accident to report it to police.
Mining a trove of materials such as Kennedy’s diary and the papers of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Farrell offers an unvarnished look at the accident and Kennedy’s other shortcomings throughout his life.
The book also examines the impact of Kennedy’s career on the nation, including his decadeslong advocacy for health care reform that became a reality as his final days approached.
It also offers a look at Senate politics that at times rivals Robert Caro’s multipart biography of Lyndon Johnson, with Kennedy navigating the politics and egos of the chamber.
Farrell’s book is a mustread for anyone interested in the politics of our era, and in understanding a complex figure whose policy achievements were as numerous as his vices. — Andrew DeMillo, Associated Press
Film historians and others digging
for a deeper vein of Oscar knowledge than mere trivia will turn up many nuggets in “The Academy and the Award,” which focuses on the initial three decades in the corporate life of the sword-wielding statuette.
Bruce Davis’ insightful history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization where he served as executive director for 20 years, explains how the academy survived more than one near-death experience, usually related to funding, and created a cultural icon with its award.
The broad story is already known. Amid sex scandals and censorship efforts in the 1920s, the film community sought a way to emphasize the art of the motion picture. Industry artists and businessmen founded the academy in 1927 and then created an award to give
their argument for film’s creative independence a symbol.
The back story, however, has been unknown or misinterpreted at times, in part because the academy has guarded the minutes of its directors’ meetings and other records. That archive was opened for Davis. The inclusion of mundane details in this history is understandable, if tedious at times, since it may well stand for decades until the academy lifts the veil again.
Along the way Davis provides an origin story for the Oscar statuette that’s as colorful as a superhero’s and debunks the legend of how the award got its name (it’s complicated). He also unwinds such byzantine decisions as those creating, killing or tinkering with various awards categories. Most revelations in the book are of the boardroom variety and can be rather dry when compared to the stormy, sexy, risky act of moviemaking.
The book rolls to a stop ahead of the tumultuous 1960s. Oscar would be lucky to have as keen and even-handed a historian as Davis to explore its next era.