Books, Arts & Manners

The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster, 1848-1983, by John H. Davis (McGraw-Hill, 722 pp., $24.95)

This, as you may be able to divine from its title, is a book about the Kennedys. Not, as many readers may rashly leap to assume, the heirs and assigns of Woodrow Kennedy, that dashing young Baptist minister who looked more like Doug Fairbanks Jr. than young Doug himself, and who burst upon the evangelical scene in Orange, Texas, in 1938 or 1939, and subsequently married our Nazarene neighbor, Miss Agnes Meeks. Rather, it is yet another book about the Kennedys of southeastern Ireland, the first of whom emigrated to the United States in the 1840s. This is the branch of the clan that, after a couple of generations, produced an extremely rich man who aspired to have his sons become Presidents of the United States and, in a manner of speaking, succeeded.

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Forrest McDonald

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The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster, 1848-1983, by John H. Davis (McGraw-Hill, 722 pp., $24.95)

This, as you may be able to divine from its title, is a book about the Kennedys. Not, as many readers may rashly leap to assume, the heirs and assigns of Woodrow Kennedy, that dashing young Baptist minister who looked more like Doug Fairbanks Jr. than young Doug himself, and who burst upon the evangelical scene in Orange, Texas, in 1938 or 1939, and subsequently married our Nazarene neighbor, Miss Agnes Meeks. Rather, it is yet another book about the Kennedys of southeastern Ireland, the first of whom emigrated to the United States in the 1840s. This is the branch of the clan that, after a couple of generations, produced an extremely rich man who aspired to have his sons become Presidents of the United States and, in a manner of speaking, succeeded.