The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

Joseph P. Kennedy was one of the most powerful, most controversial, and most consequential figures in twentieth-century American life — a man who made a vast fortune through means that were not always entirely legal, served as US Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, was widely believed to be an appeaser of Nazi Germany, and then devoted the second half of his life to the political careers of his sons. The result was a presidency, two assassinations, and a dynasty.

David Nasaw’s The Patriarch is the definitive biography — massively researched, utterly fair-minded, and written with the narrative drive of the best popular history. Nasaw had access to the Kennedy family archive and to papers that no previous biographer had seen, and what he found complicates and humanises the myth in equal measure: a man of genuine intelligence and genuine ruthlessness, whose ambitions for his children were both a gift and a curse.

For anyone interested in American political history, twentieth-century capitalism, or the mechanics of dynastic power — this is essential reading. Published by Penguin.