America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Fresh from her well-received life of Queen Elizabeth II, the English  historian and biographer Sarah Bradford turns her hand to America's own answer  to royalty, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Painstakingly detailed, impressively  fair, the result is the most definitive account yet of a woman who captured the  imagination of the American public like no First Lady before or after her.  Bradford seems to have interviewed almost everyone who had ever been intimate  with Onassis, including George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, Joan Kennedy, and even a  few ex-lovers. Most notably of all, Jackie's sister Lee Radziwill speaks with  unexpected frankness about the mixture of rivalry and affection that marked  their relationship since childhood. Jackie-lovers, take note: this is no  hagiography, and its subject certainly comes off as no saint. As gracious as  this American icon could be, she also had moments of coldness and even greed,  including a particularly shocking moment by the bedside of Ari Onassis's dying  son. Yet, in the end, non-airbrushed anecdotes like these only serve to make  this most private of public figures even more fascinating. Jackie was, as  Bradford writes, "a complex woman of many facets, concealed insecurities and  intricate defense mechanisms, a strong urge toward the limelight contrasting  with a desire for privacy and concealment.... Behind the mask of beauty and fame  lay a shrewd mind, a ruthless judgment of people, antennae finely turned to any  sign of pretentiousness or pomposity, and a wry, even raunchy sense of humor."  The figure who emerges from subsequent pages is as compelling as the heroine of  any novel, and it is to Bradford's credit that she doesn't seem to have fallen  completely under her subject's spell. Her approach is sympathetic, but never  fawning; candid, but never sensationalistic. For those who are curious not about  Jackie's glamour but about its source,America's Queenoffers an  unprecedented look at the flesh-and-blood woman behind the Camelot myth.--Carlotta DeWitt--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.