What would Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis make of J. Randy Taraborrelli’s “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” (St. Martin’s Press, $35, 439 pages) — out Tuesday, July 18, 10 days before what would’ve been her 94th birthday?
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“How now , spirit? Whither wander you?” — Prospero to Ariel in William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”
There are few rivalries more intense than that of siblings, especially sisters, and few sisterly rivalries more pronounced than that of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her younger sister Lee Radziwill, who died Feb. 16 of natural causes at her Manhattan home. She was 85.
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It is perhaps no small irony that the culture that gave us “nothing in excess; everything in moderation” also gave us a literary masterpiece whose first word is “rage.”
The ancient Greeks were a mass of contradictions. But then, human nature is a mass of contradictions and the Greeks were nothing if not masters of plumbing the human condition as seen in “A World of Emotions, Ancient Greece, 700 B.C.-200 A.D.,” on view at the Onassis Cultural Center New York through June 24. ...
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David Brooks – The New York Times’ columnist who never misses an opportunity to miss a point – wrote recently that the reason Hillary Clinton seems unlikable is that she has no hobbies.
Seriously. The column – which let Brooks in for no end of snark – had two flaws.
First, it presupposed that everyone needs a hobby, that being a workaholic is bad. Some people like to work and find the play in work, like the writer who’s a journalist but also a novelist. (That would be me.) Work isn’t stressful. People are stressful. ...
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