The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty

"The Kennedy mystique is well-trodden ground. But for the First Kennedys, it was anything but Camelot: escaping Ireland’s Great Famine aboard a coffin ship, surviving Boston’s disease-ridden tenements and searing anti-Catholic bigotry. Bridget Murphy Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s great-grandmother, leaps from the page, an indomitable force in her newly adopted country, a grocer who stocks liquor behind the counter and wrenches her penniless family from poverty. The Irishness of this story gripped me: the sociability, the raw intelligence and, yes, a bit of larceny – all conspiring in the improbable rise of not only the Kennedys but a whole new class of immigrants."