been cut by a third without losing anything
of quality or substance. The book is heavily reliant on
interviews which are presented in the main text. Some of them at
such length-two and three pages-that they give the volume the air
of an oral history. To make it worse, after someone has stopped
talking, the authors tell us the superfluous fact that his wife
walked into the room, making for more excess verbiage (p.60). And
on top of this, the Blairs have no gift for syntax or language,
let alone glimmering prose. As a result, even for an interested
reader, the book is quite tedious.

The Blairs spend much of their time delving into two areas of
Kennedy's personal life: his health problems and his
relationships with the opposite sex. Concerning the first, they
chronicle many, if not all, of the myriad and unfortunate medical
problems afflicting young Kennedy. They hone in on two in order
to straighten out the official record. Previous to this book, the
public did not know that Kennedy's back problem was congenital.
The word had been that it came about due to a football injury.

Second, the book certifies that Kennedy was a victim of Addison's
disease, which attacks the adrenal glands and makes them faulty
in hormone secretion. The condition can be critical in fights
against certain infections and times of phys