JACKIE AS EDITOR The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Biographer Greg Lawrence focuses on the later years of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, her love of books, her career as an editor at Viking and Doubleday, her dealings with authors and co-workers, and more generally, of course, her life as an American icon. His book is essentially an oral history compiled from interviews with those authors, co-workers, and collaborators. Narrator Bernadette Dunne so inhabits these voices, especially the signature breathy whisper of Jackie herself, that one forgets the authorial intermediary. An inescapable weakness of the text is the laudatory tone everyone seems to have in their recollections of Jackie—her graciousness, her erudition, her dedication to the most mundane of editorial chores. Often the narratives seem repetitive in tone and character—oddly, like a series of book blurbs. Even so, this title—interesting, revealing, full of indelible Jackie “moments”—tells more about her glamorous and complicated life than many standard biographies. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2011]