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Jackie As Editor: The Literary Life Of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2011)

by Greg Lawrence(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0312591934 (ISBN13: 9780312591939)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Thomas Dunne Books

review 1: I listened to the audio to this and it was wonderful - especially on long car rides. Although I wasn't able to make a list of the books she edited I would like to read but found that via Google. What a wonderful woman and what a wonderful editor to all her authors and how lucky we are be able to find the books she helped come to fruition during her 19 yrs. I would listen to this again or read the paper copy. So many interviews and quotes and info that it only makes you love her forever more.
review 2: Did you know Jackie O published Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe? Interesting stuff. Like most publishing memoirs, filled with stories of how certain books were acquired and edited. When you look over the list of books Jackie edited, there are a ... morefew classics (Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy) and a lot of stuff that is likely out of print and forgotten by most people. Again, like most publishing memoirs. Interesting to read about an editor whose career was a mix of privilege and the usual contentious relationship with the pub board. I wasn't quite sure what to think about the passages in this book relating to the commercialization of Doubleday in the 80s. Doubleday was commercial, and yet Jackie could still acquire these dancers' memoirs, obscure histories, and guides to fashion? Then again when I read the title/subtitle to the Stalin memoir she'd acquired that was published after her death, I got it: the original title was, artfully, Three Stalins, and the final title/subtitle was Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives. Yeah...yup, that's more like it. Jackie's described over and over again as an "old school" or "classic" editor, who cultivates relationships with her authors and nurtures them through the writing process, often doing quite a bit of rewriting herself. And the narrative seems to nudge us toward believing that this results in book sales, since, like the aforementioned Stalin book, her judicious editing of the same author resulted in a bestseller--Radzinsky's The Last Tsar--whereas the Stalin bio that went to press without her discerning eye was a big flop. less

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