Richie's Picks: UPCLOSE: ROBERT F. KENNEDY: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIFE by Marc
Aronson, Viking, April 2007, ISBN: 0-670-06066-5
"Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin and John."
--Dion DiMucci
"Bobby Kennedy's short, eventful, and ultimately tragic life, you might say,
was the transition from a time of secrets to one of exposure. We now know
as much about his crippling flaws as his lofty aspirations. If he no longer
looms as a pure Kennedy prince, that is all the better. For instead of an
idol, he comes across as a dark, complex -- and deeply human --human being."
It is rare for me to share a book's ending but, in this instance, it is
difficult to improve upon Marc Aronson's own conclusion of what he has so
successfully accomplished in crafting this exceptional biography for middle school
and high school students about Robert F. Kennedy, a larger than life figure
from my childhood. I'd previously thought I knew a lot about Bobby Kennedy.
Boy, was I wrong!
Actually, this is not a biography exclusively for adolescents, for the
impeccable research that is at the foundation of this work will easily hold up
when some college student decides to use it for a class, and the drama of
Aronson's tale will quite handily engage adult readers as well. Marc Aronson is
well known for doing informational adolescent literature the right way; in
fact, he was awarded the very first Sibert Informational Book Award, an American
Library Association award which honors an author "whose work of nonfiction
has made a significant contribution to the field of children's literature."
What Marc Aronson was required to do, in writing his first book for
Penguin's brand new CLOSEUP biography series for adolescents, debuting this
spring,
was to distill all of his extensive research down to 200 pages of adolescent
reading. (This will be one of the trademarks of this series.) And while
this has got to be a significant challenge for someone like Marc who is known
for thoroughly exploring both their subject and the world in which that subject
lives, what the reader ends up with here is a 200-page biography that is
quite a manageable read for most teens and is an utterly engaging and often
horrifying story containing not a single clunker or superfluous sentence.
In revealing the person that was Bobby Kennedy, the author lays out how
Bobby's disposition, his position in the birth order of the famous Kennedy clan,
and his father's disdain for him in contrast to the paternal nurturing of Joe
Jr. and Jack, all had an immense -- some would say, fatal -- influence upon
the man that Robert Kennedy grew up to be:
"Reckless courage was a characteristic Robert Francis Kennedy showed
throughout his life. The bigger the challenge, the more eager he was to throw
himself at it. As a child, Bobby flung himself into cold waters. As a lawyer in
Washington, and later as Attorney General, he took on the nation's most
dangerous mobsters. He went up, one-on-one, against Jimmy Hoffa, a corrupt union
official who was as ruthless as he was powerful. At the height of white
racial violence, Kennedy made himself the number-one target of armed and
hate-crazed segregationists. Then at the worst moment of African-American fury
and
dispair he chose to speak in an all-black neighborhood. In a time when
assassinations of outspoken leaders were all too common, he plunged into endless
crowds."
An interesting strategy that Aronson employs in his writing here is his
allusion to pieces of well known children's literature in explaining Bobby
Kennedy's story, such as when he refers to Portsmouth Priory "as a kind of
Hogwarts-under-construction," or when he compares the severing of Bobby from his
brother through Jack's 1963 assassination to the agony suffered in THE GOLDEN
COMPASS when people are severed from their daemons.
Looking like it will be the antithesis and an antidote to the vapid and/or
exceedingly dense institutional biography series that you so often find on
school library shelves, UPCLOSE: ROBERT KENNEDY is a superb piece of writing
that transforms an icon into a real human being.
Richie Partington
Student, SJSU SLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
Moderator, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks
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