Description
Description
Jackie Under My Skin is a richly original and fascinating investigation into how Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed our definitions of personal identity and style. For thirty years we have lived with our internalized images of "Jackie, " but until now no writer has definitively explored what it feels like to exist in imaginative and heartfelt connection to this ubiquitous icon. In an elegiac gallery of fantasies and tableaux, Wayne Koestenbaum explains the late First Lady's mesmeric hold on America by anatomizing the myths and metaphors that have attached to her. Analyzing her iconography with both passion and precision, he places stories about Jackie - and photos of Jackie - within the context of literature, film, and the idiosyncratic imagination. Following her into America's dreamwork, far from pious "family values, " Wayne Koestenbaum dares to see her as an embodiment of pleasure, a figure of Circean extravagance, and a unique and necessary emblem of that most exhilarating of pursuits: freedom without responsibility.
About the Author
About the Author
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM has published five books of poetry, one novel, and six books of nonfiction. A graduate of Harvard and Princeton, he is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Pop interpretation at its finest . . . and every bit of it is fun to read." --The Boston Globe
"Dazzling, exuberant . . . Koestenbaum writes with a heady lyricism that makes Jackie-watching an exercise of the soul as well as of the intellect." --New York Magazine "Koestenbaum's explanation of the Jackie O phenomenon is as fresh and thought-provoking as they come." --Los Angeles Times "Some of the most entertaining prose in years . . . A thoughtful and unexpectedly moving book." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Impassioned insight . . . By turns comic and elegaic, respectful and blasphemous...little or nothing escapes [Koestenbaum's] gaze." --Newsday
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Picador USA
Pub date:
2009-10-27
Length:
304 pages

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