IF KENNEDY LIVED by Jeff Greenfield, a Political Fantasia

IF KENNEDY LIVED: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History
JEFF GREENFIELD
G.P. Putnam's Sons
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: November 22, 1963: JFK does not die. What would happen to his life, his presidency, his country, his world?

Based on memoirs, histories, oral histories, fresh reporting, and his own knowledge of the players, this book looks at the tiny hinges of history—and the extraordinary changes that would have resulted if they had gone another way.

Now he presents his most compelling narrative of all about the historical event that has riveted us for fifty years. What if Kennedy were not killed that fateful day? What would the 1964 campaign have looked like? Would changes have been made to the ticket? How would Kennedy, in his second term, have approached Vietnam, civil rights, the Cold War? With Hoover as an enemy, would his indiscreet private life finally have become public? Would his health issues have become so severe as to literally cripple his presidency? And what small turns of fate in the days and years before Dallas might have kept him from ever reaching the White House in the first place?

As with Then Everything Changed, the answers Greenfield provides and the scenarios he develops are startlingly realistic, rich in detail, shocking in their projections, but always deeply, remarkably plausible. It is a tour de force of American political history.

My Review: See all those questions in the publisher's copy above? Those are the very ones that Jeff Greenfield, a pundit and powerful columnist, addresses with a great deal of panache and a large helping of nerve. Greenfield was often seen on Nightline during its glory years as THE political chat show.

Greenfield graduated with a JD from Yale before going to work for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy after the president was assassinated. That in mind, imagine my surprise when RFK comes across as a really vicious, very nasty character in this telling of his brother's presidency. Apparently he was no saint. But then again, neither was Jack, as we all now know.

What makes me most happy about this book is its major weakness: If you're not conversant with the politics and personalities of that day, this book will read like a fairly dry novel. Without knowing the name McGeorge Bundy, for example, there's not much point in picking up the book. Better yet, if the name carries with it an image of hornrims and a honking accent, the book will light a little Eternal Flame for Camelot.

And for my own part, I'd LOVE to have seen what Vaughn Meader would've done with a second term! (Yes, I know that went whoooshing over a lot of non-gray heads. So will the rest of the book.)

So why give the serviceable, journalistic prose four stars? Because the prose isn't the point. The tale, the imagining of JFK fighting and winning a very different 1964 election battle and doing so much damage to his own interests...that is what people with memories of that horrible, horrible moment in time when our president was murdered before our horrified eyes would pay the $12.99 for a Kindle copy, or $26.95 for a hardcover version of the book to experience.

Beautiful Tropical Getaway (to 1845!) for Snowed-In Folks 10 December 2013

AS FLIES TO WHATLESS BOYS
ROBERT ANTONI
Akashic Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1845 London, an engineer, philosopher, philanthropist, and bold-faced charlatan, John Adolphus Etzler, has invented machines that he thinks will transform the division of labor and free all men. He forms a collective called the Tropical Emigration Society (TES), and recruits a variety of London citizens to take his machines and his misguided ideas to form a proto-socialist, utopian community in the British colony of Trinidad.

Among his recruits is a young boy (and the book's narrator) named Willy, who falls head-over-heels for the enthralling and wise Marguerite Whitechurch. Coming from the gentry, Marguerite is a world away from Willy's laboring class. As the voyage continues, and their love for one another strengthens, Willy and Marguerite prove themselves to be true socialists, their actions and adventures standing in stark contrast to Etzler's disconnected theories.

Robert Antoni's tragic historical novel, accented with West Indian cadence and captivating humor, provides an unforgettable glimpse into nineteenth-century Trinidad & Tobago.

My Review:

We sat in silence, exhausted, filled-up. We didn't move. We couldn't have moved--not a muscle--because we didn't exist yet. Neither me nor him. Only the story existed, during those few final moments of silence after my father's voice had come to a halt.

Catnip. This book was catnip for me, pure uncut catnip of the finest grade. Robert Antoni teaches master's degree fiction-writing classes at the New School. Lucky men and women who take the classes, to hear him tell his stories!

At its heart, this is a simple tale of greed, passion, and the lifelong effects of believing in a dream. Chicanery is always a worry for the True Believer, because the promise of a dream come true is ever the best bait to lure them into disaster, personal and financial and, not infrequently, mortal. Something dies when a person's True Belief is taken from them, or lost, or simply abandoned (as if this abandonment is ever simple). Many times, I suspect, the pain of it is unendurable and the bereft believer sees no reason to go on...disease or despair carry him off.

Others, like our narrator Willy, live on and make life, actual life, work for them without dreams, but with some weird, warped hopes left, hopes that don't see much daylight as the ex-dreamer isn't likely to chat them about. Willy doesn't really want to have hopes. He wants to find his dreams. I think all of us know that quest's end. But the novel, well, a novel is a place to work out the truths of endings and the frailties of beginnings. This novel's truth is in the ending, and it stings the soft places of a tender soul. It also rings perfectly true and wistfully beautiful. A family, once created, is a hard thing to leave, to destroy; even death doesn't do the job.

But most families have invisible members. Some have more than others. Willy...Mr. Tucker, as he becomes...carried the invisible members of his family until, exhausted, he lost the eternal battle with gravity. How, and why, and what he made, these are all the subject of the novel, and the meat of life as we all live it.

Only most of us don't have beautiful words to wrap our truth in. Fortune smiled on William Tucker. His truth comes enrobed in lovely, lovely language, satisfyingly musical in the inward ear.

A pleasure of a read. A lovely artifact of a book. A delight on many levels, and a deeply felt, deeply moving novel.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.