America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

by Sarah Bradford

Paperback, 2001

Status

Available

Genres

Publication

Penguin Books (2001), Edition: Illustrated, 544 pages

Description

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has captivated the American public for more than five decades. From her introduction to the world as "debutante of the year" in 1947 to her untimely death in 1994, she has truly remained America's answer to royalty. In America's Queen, the acclaimed biographer of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Grace reveals the real Jackie in a sympathetic but frank portrait of an amazing woman who has dazzled us for years. Using remarkable new sources--including in-depth interviews with Jackie's sister, Lee Radziwell--Sarah Bradford has written a timely celebration of a life that was more private than commonly supposed. Jackie's privileged upbringing instilled rigid self-control while her expedient marriage into the overwhelming Kennedy clan consolidated her determination. Revealing new testimony from many of the couple's friends shows the profound complexities both of this apparently very public relationship and of her controversial marriage to Aristotle Onassis. Here is the private Jackie--neglected wife, vigilant mother, and working widow--whose contradictory and fascinating nature is illuminated by all that Bradford has discovered.… (more)

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Rating

(55 ratings; 3.4)

Media reviews

The Guardian (UK)

It seems fruitless now to survey the casual detritus of her life and pronounce her vain, vapid or self-seeking; to call into question her much-vaunted ersatz-aristocratic good taste; or to accuse her of being, at heart, small-minded and avaricious. There's a morally tough common sense in such

criticisms that the immaculate self-absorption of her public persona was always designed to elude or frustrate. Her virtues and their matching, mirroring vices belong less to history than to the world of Scott Fitzgerald, and, like so many of Fitzgerald's haunting and ambivalent characters, she was deliberately arrested and incomplete. She lived within the poetic fiction of her own impossible sensitivity, and was eventually doomed by it.... once the layers of scandal and scandalous speculation are stripped away, we are left with certain observable, significant actions, and these mostly do her credit.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member Freisianbeauty

I love everything to do with the sixties, but I found this to be like swimming through concrete. It isn't a people friendly book at all. I found the start incredibly boring (Sorry) but only started to get into it when it got towards them campaigning and through the white house years. The chapters

(im my copy anyway) just kept going and the only breaks were when someone was being quoted. Sorry Sarah, I don't think i'd recommed it to anyone.

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LibraryThing member janeht

Very interesting and informative. Hard to work out some connections/history as I'm not American but a good read.

LibraryThing member JoWright

A decent book... given the author's credentials, I expected more fact and less hearsay/ gossip... a bit too gossipy at times for me...and the amount of time spent on the philandering of the Kennedy men toook away from the life of Jackie... so many anecdotes about affairs not only of JFK but of dad

and brothers... didn't understand how that shaped Jackie... it clearly did, but wasn't articulated well. In any event, Jackie was characterized as a woman with a strong sense of self, who focused on her passions and her steadfast love of her children.

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LibraryThing member Katyefk

A very comprehensive and well written book. Very detailed and pretty shocking to read about the truth behind the image.

LibraryThing member AdonisGuilfoyle

I started reading this biography a few years back, but abandoned Jackie's life story - according to Sarah Bradford - midway through, for no reason other than already having read countless other Kennedy biographies. Bored by another book recently, I decided to pick Jackie up again.

A better title

might have been 'The Many Faces of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis', who seems to have been able to mould her personality to suit her surname, from privileged daughter to devoted wife and regal First Lady, doting mother, professional widow, socialite and native New Yorker. I can only admire her bravery in making the most of her life in every situation.

Bradford is thorough and comprehensive in her account, if 'thorough' means cribbing the biographies of every tom, dick and harry - or Jack, Lyndon and Maud Shaw - who ever met Jackie, and quoting from mysterious 'friend of a friend' sources. The options of any biographer tackling such a popular and well-documented personality must be similarly limited, of course, but the end result is still seems slightly lazy and 'grubby'. There is gushing praise from those who loved Jackie, scurrilous gossip from those with an axe to grind, along with the occasional documented fact, so the reader is almost left to choose their own path - did she have an affair with Bobby Kennedy after Jack's death? What were her true feelings for Aristotle Onassis? You decide.

I still have a massive crush on Jack Kennedy, in spite of all his failings (maybe even because of them), and Jackie too, so I don't mind reading the wheat and the chaff of biographies. Bradford's is easy to read and comparatively brief, at least.

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LibraryThing member Whisper1

While there is a lot of information I didn't know about Jackie Kennedy, I felt this was way over the top in detail, and very boring. I don't think it deserves a review.

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