Louis Bayard at the NY Times:
In the opening sentence of her rage-swollen “Ask Not,” Maureen Callahan declares that her book “is not ideological or partisan.” It is, of course, both. Sometimes it is both in extremis. You need only cast an eye over its cover, which, like the book itself, is black and white and red all over. Bad men wronging good women: cheating on them, abandoning them, infecting them, turning them into alcoholics, leaving them for dead, raping and maiming and killing them.
That the men in this case are (mostly) Kennedys is meant to shock us, but the only shock by now is shock’s absence. Decades of reportage have left us with a grim roll call. Mary Jo Kopechne, slowly suffocating beneath three feet of Chappaquiddick black water. Pamela Kelley, thrown from a Jeep and paralyzed for life while the driver, a Kennedy, walked away with a $100 fine.
more here.