Beautifully written, What Remains “gets at the essence of what matters,” wrote Oprah Winfrey. With unflinching honesty and a journalist’s keen eye, Carole Radziwill explores the enduring ties of family, the complexities of marriage, the importance of friendship, and the challenges of self-invention.
Three weeks later Anthony dies of cancer. Kennedy Jr., Anthony’s cousin, and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Carole’s closest friend. A small plane plunges into the ocean carrying John F. What Remains begins with loss and returns to loss. Her marriage led her into the old world of European nobility and the newer world of American aristocracy. Her career at ABC News led her to the refugee camps of Cambodia, to a bunker in Tel Aviv, and to the scene of the Menendez murders. At nineteen, she struck out for New York City to find a different life. Carole grew up in a small suburb with a large, eccentric cast of characters. What Remains is a vivid and haunting memoir about a girl from a working-class town who becomes an award-winning television producer and marries a prince, Anthony Radziwill. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette, and his cousin Anthony Radziwill, by Radziwill’s widow. I read every word and, almost to prove a point, she thanks her bff and sister-in-law, Teresa, who–get this–is from my very own La Grande, Oregon! I am reminded that it truly is a very teeny tiny microscopic world, and anything is possible.A stunning, tragic memoir about John F.
Now, what am I going to do with this big bold, beautiful life?” While there is a tight and lovely metaphor about fortune threaded throughout, which works on several levels, the reader leaves the book thinking, “Anything is possible. I hope she is exploring what to do with this big, bold, beautiful life she gets to live. Carole Radziwill worked as an award-winning journalist with ABC News for fifteen years. Maybe she has survivor’s guilt, but I hope she doesn’t. She loses her three closest people in the span of three weeks.
Radziwill has lived an extraordinary life, and so while this is a memoir, and a genre with which readers might be familiar, it’s is so completely unique in the extraordinary events and circumstances she’s survived. The reader might be surprised to find that this group of “elites” are thoughtful, frugal, playful, stressed, sometimes uncertain. The life she lives once she’s seriously dating and married to her husband Anthony is (emotionally) much like other everyday relationships, except with better food, clothing, apartments, travel, and lovely places to stay. The book takes the reader to the poor gravel roads and streams of New York state, to the haphazard suburbs, to a chaotic, but close family life, to the rush of a bold new career in a city, to war zones, to falling in love (without cliché), and forging deep friendships with “America’s royalty.” Readers see that we all ache, love, suffer, and feel the joy of the sun on our skin and the wind in our hair universally.
0 kommentar(er)
