Eunice
The Kennedy Who Changed the World
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this “revelation” of a biography (USA TODAY), a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist examines the life and times of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, arguing she left behind the Kennedy family’s most profound political legacy.
While Joe Kennedy was grooming his sons for the White House and the Senate, his Stanford-educated daughter, Eunice, was hijacking her father’s fortune and her brothers’ political power to engineer one of the great civil rights movements of our time on behalf of millions of children and adults with intellectual disabilities. Her compassion was born of rage: at the medical establishment that had no answers for her sister Rosemary, at her revered but dismissive father, whose vision for his family did not extend beyond his sons, and at a government that failed to deliver on America’s promise of equality.
Now, in this “fascinating” (the Today show), “nuanced” (The Boston Globe) biography, “ace reporter and artful storyteller” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author Megan Marshall) Eileen McNamara finally brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver out from her brothers’ shadow. Granted access to never-before-seen private papers, including the scrapbooks Eunice kept as a schoolgirl in prewar London, McNamara paints an extraordinary portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and out of step with it: the visionary founder of Special Olympics, a devout Catholic in a secular age, and an officious, cigar-smoking, indefatigable woman whose impact on American society was longer lasting than that of any of the Kennedy men.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Does Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921 2009), the fifth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children, deserve a full-fledged biography? McNamara, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the Boston Globe, answers with a resounding yes. Spurred by the virtual loss of her intellectually disabled sister Rosemary, whom Joseph had lobotomized in 1941, and who then "disappeared" from the family, Shriver became a relentless campaigner for those similarly disabled. She helped expand the Special Olympics into an international organization, persuaded her brother John to establish a National Institute on Child Health and Human Development, and funded programs through the Kennedy Foundation. McNamara also portrays a deeply devout Catholic dedicated to "being an instrument of God's will on earth"; a woman happily married to Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps; and an often engaged (though sometimes absent) mother. While the author clearly admires her subject, this is no hagiography; Shriver can come across as arrogant and entitled, among other flaws. McNamara's book is an exemplary biography: thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and just the right length. It deserves a wide readership.
