When Lions Roar

September 15, 2014
Torches pass from fathers to sons—and sometimes get dropped—in this sprawling saga of two political dynasties. Journalist Maier (Masters of Sex) surveys the tangled relationships between Winston Churchill, Joseph P. Kennedy, and their respective children. During the 1930s and the WWII era, Churchill, a combative foe of Hitler, and Kennedy, the isolationist and mildly pro-German (and anti-Semitic) American ambassador to Britain, clashed over policy towards the Nazis and the looming war. By the 1960s, however, Kennedy’s son John F. Kennedy revived Churchillian themes in his Cold War policies and rhetoric towards the Soviets. The wrangle between the shady, Machiavellian Kennedy père and the bluff, stentorian Churchill (with a manipulative Franklin Roosevelt stirring the pot) extends to their parental styles; Maier juxtaposes Kennedy’s stern molding of his sons into effective political operators with Churchill’s muddled relationship with his son Randolph, a promising youth who became a wastrel. Much of the book is a gossipy, entertaining, but unfocused panorama of the glittering social world of wealthy, powerful, aristocrats—it is full of wartime adventure, romance, and innumerable adulteries. Maier vivid profiles of these charismatic figures makes for a nuanced study. 16-page b&w photo insert.

September 1, 2014
Journalist Maier (Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love, 2009, etc.) pieces together a multigenerational saga of two renowned families. Writing a biography of an individual can become beset with difficulties. Writing a multicharacter history of both the Churchills and the Kennedys, covering primarily the 1930s through the 1960s, involves an almost unimaginably high degree of difficulty. Maier's cast of characters includes 14 Churchill family members and 15 Kennedy family members. As chronicled by the author, Winston Churchill, the British prime minister who led his empire through World War II, is without question the dominant figure within his family tree. Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy, is less dominant but a formidable presence nonetheless. Churchill's wife, Clementine, and Joseph's wife, Rose, receive meaningful supporting roles, as do the Churchills' son Randolph and three of the nine Kennedy children (Joseph Junior, JFK and Kathleen). Beginning in the early 1930s, the connections between the two families grew increasingly complex, especially after Joseph became the American ambassador to the U.K., appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. Unsurprisingly, Maier portrays Winston Churchill as a highly educated man of letters who sometimes slipped into despair. He portrays Joseph as a scoundrel in business and a womanizer but someone who demonstrated intense devotion to his children. Perhaps most pleasing is Maier's skill at locating information about less famous individuals who played key roles in the ways the two families connected and disconnected. The most intriguing connecting character is Kay Halle, a writer/socialite who worked her way into the inner circles of both the Kennedys and the Churchills. As this thick book jumps back and forth between the two families, Maier sometimes strains to link all the words and deeds, but his research carries the book along as interesting anecdotes continue to emerge.

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October 1, 2014

Two of the most notable names in 20th-century history are Churchill and Kennedy. In this fascinating dual biography of Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Joseph Kennedy (1888-1969), Maier (The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings) describes not only both men's impact on politics but also the intertwined lives of their families over the course of four decades. Kennedy managed to obtain an appointment as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in the early 1930s, where he struck up an acquaintance with Churchill, recently excluded from office because of his opposition to India's independence. In subsequent years, the relationship between the two men waxed and waned and eventually broadened to include Churchill's son, Randolph, as well as Kennedy's son Jack. Maier delves into archives on both sides of the Atlantic to bring to his narrative an impressive grasp of the two clans and the rich array of personalities that interacted with them over the decades. This is a book that cannot be put down, and its wealth of details, smoothly told, will hold the reader's attention from beginning to end. VERDICT An excellent work for all history collections, especially those devoted to 20th-century political history. [See Prepub Alert, 5/4/14.]--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2014
In the exhaustively chronicled Kennedy saga, Maier found a scantly explored angle in the political dynasty's Irish ancestry (The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings, 2003), and he repeats that feat here with the story of the family's connections to Winston Churchill and his clan. These relationships began in the early 1930s, blossomed during Joseph Kennedy's controversial 193840 ambassadorship to Britain, and coursed along until the late 1960s. Emphasizing private affairs of numerous relatives and friends of patresfamilias Joseph and Winston, Maier taps personal papers to create narratives of happeningstravels, parties, friendships formed and strained, marriages forged and sundered, political ambitions achieved or thwarted, all against the defining event of the Kennedy-Churchill nexus, WWII. Joseph Kennedy's conduct as the American envoy reverberates through Maier's anecdotes; his predictions of British defeat were detested by the Churchills. There's more popular readability, however, in Maier's focus on romances that sparked during the war. He has the juice about Randolph Churchill and Pamela Digby, Kathleen Kennedy's marriage into British aristocracy, and the dalliances of peripheral figures like socialite Kay Halle. A sprawling yet intimate panorama of two famous political dynasties.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)