This was surprisingly interesting. "Surprisingly" does sound bad though, doesn't it? I think a better description is that I didn't get what I was expecting. This isn't so much a complete biography as it is a limited one. The focus is ruthlessly on the last two decades of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' life, when she worked as a publisher first at Viking and then at Doubleday in New York. There is vanishingly little here about her marriages or early life, and a great deal about her relationships with books and reading. Which, frankly, interests me far more. (I'm reading my way through a list of biographies right now, hence the lukewarm enthusiasm for what I thought would be a typical example of someone I was only very mildly interested in.)

Kuhn structures this book in an extremely well thought out way. Each chapter is based around a group of books that JKO edited, and they are linked by theme rather than chronology. Such themes include, for instance, French history, photography, historical fiction, costumes, political biographies and so on. Each book within that theme is approached through the lens of JKO's particular interests. Her fascination with French royalty, for example, is compared and contrasted with her experiences of being part of the political and social elite in America. Her interest in costumes is interpreted through her own experiences of fashion. Which makes this a very non-linear book, but nonetheless an extremely comprehensive one that left me with much more of a sense of intellectual character than I expected. I'm glad I read it.