The Last Brother
by By McGinniss, Joe
Category: History , General

In The Last Brother, Joe McGinniss brings to startling and disturbing life the childhood, the brief triumph, and the long downward slide of the last Kennedy brother...and exposes, as never before, the chilling reality behind the glittering facade of America's First Dysfunctional Family, as well as the terrible cost of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's dark ambitions for his children - even the last and least of them.His book focuses in particular on the extraordinary sixties, a decade that began in glory for the family with Jack's ascension to the presidency, and ended - after the murders of Jack and Bobby, the tragedy at Chappaquidick, and their father's death - with Teddy, the last brother, standing alone in the rubble of Camelot.While The Last Brother is both shocking and newsworthy, Teddy Kennedy emerges as a curiously tragic figure, the victim of his own family, forever "the fat, awkward little boy" who was ignored by his siblings, his father and his mother, then propelled, unwilling and unprepared, into the public limelight.Searing, yet strangely moving and even sympathetic, The Last Brother presents a detailed, tragic portrait of a man at war with himself, doomed to live in the giant shadow of his brothers, trapped in the glorious but hollow Kennedy myth, longing - but unable - to escape.