Bibliograph

Eunice, the Kennedy who changed the world, Eileen McNamara

Type

Label

Eunice, the Kennedy who changed the world, Eileen McNamara

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-353) and index

resource.biographical

individual biography

Illustrations

genealogical tablesillustrationsplates

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Eunice

Nature of contents

bibliography

Responsibility statement

Eileen McNamara

Sub title

the Kennedy who changed the world

Summary

While Joe Kennedy was grooming his sons for the White House and the Senate, his Stanford-educated daughter Eunice was tapping 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. Now, in Eunice, Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen McNamara finally brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver out from her brothers' shadow to show an officious, cigar-smoking, indefatigable woman of unladylike determination and deep compassion born of rage: at the medical establishment that had no answers for her sister Rosemary; at the revered but dismissive father whose vision for his family did not extend beyond his sons; and at the government that failed to deliver on America's promise of equality. Granted access to never-before-seen private papers--from the scrapbooks Eunice kept as a schoolgirl in prewar London to her thoughts on motherhood and feminism--McNamara paints a vivid portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and out of step with it: the visionary founder of the Special Olympics, a devout Catholic in a secular age, and a formidable woman whose impact on American society was longer lasting than that of any of the Kennedy men

Classification