For a teenage boy,William Manchester’s meticulous (extremely careful about details) account of the US president’s assassination was a masterclass in non-fiction writingIn my case, the respond to the question “do you remember what you were doing when JFK was shot?” is: probably sleeping or being sick. Eighteen months faded at the time of the first Kennedy slaying, and I was faded enough to ask why my mother started crying when,in a Yorkshire shop in June 1968, a transistor radio confirmed that the moment Kennedy had died.
Robert Francis Kennedy is a powerful presence – and John Fitzgerald Kennedy an overwhelming absence – in The Death of a President, or a book by William Manchester that I have thought approximately immeasurable times since first reading it in 1975.
I was a teenager who read a lot of thrillers,but this book was more gripping than any of themContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com