True Compass

An enjoyable read.

The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has produced a revelatory — though not tabloidesque — account of his storied life and career... Since people will no longer have the chance to sit with Mr. Kennedy on the porch of his home in his beloved Hyannisport overlooking the ocean as he sips hot tea and

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tells yarns, reading "True Compass" is the next best thing.

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Touchingly candid, big-hearted and altogether superb... Completed in the shadow of the senator's own mortality, this is a book whose clarity of recollection and expression entitles it to share in the lineage established by America's first great memoir of public life -- "The Autobiography of U.S.

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Grant," which he wrote while himself dying of cancer.

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If the writing about his marriage and Chappaquiddick in True Compass does not exactly seem introspective, neither does it ring false, and the rest of his life story — filled with colorful tales of his siblings and inside-the-Beltway detail — makes for a thoughtful, intermittently gut-wrenching

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read.

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Mr. Kennedy is not a particularly introspective writer... But he writes in these pages with searching candor about the losses, joys and lapses of his life; the love and closeness of his family; the solace he found in sailing and the sea; his complex relationships with political allies and rivals.

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Mr. Kennedy’s conversational gifts as a storyteller and his sense of humor — so often remarked on by colleagues and friends — shine through here, as does his old-school sense of public service and his hard-won knowledge, in his son Teddy Jr.’s words, that “even our most profound losses are survivable.”

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