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Title: Reading Jackie
Subtitle: Her Autobiography in Books
Author: William Kuhn
Narrator: Susan Denaker
Format: Unabridged
Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
Language: English
Release date: 12-07-10
Publisher: Random House Audio
Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 48 votes
Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Celebrities
Publisher's Summary:
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print during the last two decades of her life as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. Based on archives and interviews with Jackie's authors, colleagues, and friends, Reading Jackie mines this significant period of her life to reveal both the serious and the mischievous woman underneath the glamorous public image.
Though Jackie had a reputation for avoiding publicity, she willingly courted controversy in her books. She was the first editor to commission a commercially successful book telling the story of Thomas Jeffersons relationship with his female slave. Her publication of Gelsey Kirkland's attack on dance icon George Balanchine caused another storm.
Jackie rarely spoke of her personal life, but many of her books ran parallel to, echoed, and emerged from her own experience. She was the editor behind best sellers on the assassinations of Tsar Nicholas II and John Lennon, and in another book, she paid tribute to the allure of Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas. Her other projects take us into territory she knew well: journeys to Egypt and India, explorations of the mysteries of female beauty and media exploitation, into the minds of photographers, art historians, and the designers at Tiffany & Co.
Reading Jackie provides a compelling behind-the-scenes look at Jackie at work: how she commissioned books and nurtured authors, as well as how she helped to shape stories that spoke to her strongly. Jackie is remembered today for her marriages to JFK and to Aristotle Onassis, but her real legacy is the books that reveal the tastes, recollections, and passions of an independent woman.
Editorial Reviews:
William Kuhn has written delicate political biographies before, on the life of Queen Victoria's private secretary and on her Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Reading Jackie is his first foray into American royalty, and it does not disappoint. The life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was both devastatingly public and utterly protected as private. Made famous by her two powerful marriages, most people have no idea that Jackie spent two decades, from 1975 until her death in 1994, as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. More than 100 books passed through her hands during this time, and Kuhn insightfully interprets how Jackie's editorial decisions reflect on her own history, from books on assassination to fashion.
Her work in publishing was of course almost as star-studded as her work in politics, and she often wielded her publishing power for greater political good. Narrator Susan Denaker presents these cameos with the utmost respect, from a soft London undertow for John Lennon to a gentle New York sparkle for Diana Vreeland. Reserving the subtlest of lilts for Jackie herself, Denaker's formidably broad dialect work as a stage actor is tightly reined in here, giving a power to the writing that any attempt at straightforward impersonation would have made laughable. Kuhn's presentation is primarily to lavish praise on the choices our virtuous hero made, but he also allows some more humanizing glimpses into Jackie's coy sense of humor.
This book is not meant to be particularly revelatory, but instead to view from a fresh angle the image America already knows.
