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Tarfumes.com - The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America
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List Price: $25.00
Our Price: $16.50
Your Save: $ 8.50 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Henry Holt and Co.
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.922092
EAN: 9780805077926
ISBN: 0805077928
Label: Henry Holt and Co.
Manufacturer: Henry Holt and Co.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2008-05-27
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Release Date: 2008-05-27
Studio: Henry Holt and Co.
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Editorial Reviews:
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The definitive account of Robert Kennedy’s exhilarating and tragic 1968 campaign for president—a revelatory history that is especially resonant now After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy—formerly Jack’s no-holds-barred political warrior—almost lost hope. He was haunted by his brother’s murder, and by the nation’s seeming inabilities to solve its problems of race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. Bobby sensed the country’s pain, and when he announced that he was running for president, the country united behind his hopes. Over the action-packed eighty-two days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedy’s promise to lead them toward a better time. And after an assassin’s bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s, crowds lined up along the country’s railroad tracks to say goodbye to Bobby. With new research, interviews, and an intimate sense of Kennedy, Thurston Clarke provides an absorbing historical narrative that goes right to the heart of America’s deepest despairs—and most fiercely held dreams—and tells us more than we had understood before about this complicated man and the heightened personal, racial, political, and national dramas of his times.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Valuabe insight on Kennedy's campaign
Comment: I'm not American, nor was I alive when RFK was murdured, but this book made me travel along with all the Kennedy entourage during those 82 days of campaign (the part that described the death, and aftermath, of Martin Luther King made me feel all the emotion people must have felt), and more that that, gave me the precise picture of what RFK wanted to America, in one word, his philosophy. Even if you have already read more about RFK will not be disapointed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Comment: This is one of the best books I have read in a long time! It is very personal and inspiring. It is like being on the campaign trial with Robert Kennedy. I would strongly reccomend this book to anyone interested in american politcs.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good but still lacking period piece
Comment: First off this is an excellent profile of the hectic RFK campaign in 1968. It does a wonderful job of expressing the frenetic pace of the campaign and how it inspired hope in so many people. The book does a wonderful job at trying to inspire in the reader the sense of optimism that RFK's campaign inspired in so many groups.
The one great weakness of the book is that it often descends into raising Kennedy to almost a sainthood. It is very obvious that the author admires RFK and thinks he would have made a great president. That maybe but it does cloud the author's work and makes this almost as much of a sports like bio then a work like history.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Asking 'why Not
Comment:
If I were rating Bobby, there aren't enough stars in the heavens to measure how I feel about him. I was 17 when he died, and I don't think I have taken politics seriously since. Even the left of center Democrats I usually agree with on policy seem pale, scheming elitists compared to Bobby. So do the other Kennedys actually.
Someone, I think Jack Newfield, has argued that Bobby Kennedy's murder was the most tragic event of the 1960s. That if you could go back in time and stop only one of the three murders that defined the decade, it would be Bobby, because he is the one who was still growing, whose work was not nearly complete already. He seems to be the one, who, had he lived, would have really been an agent for change.
The book however, is slight, more a compilation of admiring stories than anything else. Granted the book is a look at a very brief part of Bobby's life and not a full scale biography, but the author Thurston Clark does not go into much about Kennedy's past, and what set him on that road to the Ambassador Hotel.
He also assumes thoughout that had Kennedy lived he would have been elected president. I doubt it, the old machine politics still ruled. The question it seems to me, is how much more vigorous the anti-movement would have been with Bobby as part of it, possibly forcing Humphrey or Nixon to end the Vietnam war quicker, to even to act more aggressively against poverty and hunger in America.
Customer Rating:
Summary: What politics should be about
Comment: One of the best campaign books I have ever read. As he did in "Ask Not," Thurston Clark brings out the back-story of a great moment in history. In this case, RFK's decision to run for president, despite his many misgivings about doing so. It chronicles his determination to run the way he wanted to - not the ways the polls and pols told him to run. Ultimately, though, "The Last Campaign" shows us what a real leader looks like and ought to behave. With his characteristic bluntness, RFK didn't shirk from reminding people that in a democracy, everyone is responsible for the country's actions. One cannot blame Washington for their problems without holding themselves just as accountable. Sadly, as Clark cites in the book, no politician from any party could get away with such an attitude today.
A great book about a great man.
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