BOOKS IN BRIEF American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. by Richard Blow (Henry Holt, 288 pp., $25). Take the celebrity heir to a political fortune, trying both to embrace and to evade the family legacy, and you have George, the first political magazine produced wholly by and for people who do not like politics very much. Add the reminiscences of the magazine’s star-struck editor, and you have Richard Blow’s “American Son,” an account of working with John F. Kennedy Jr. during the last four years of his truncated life, a tell-little book that tells more than Blow imagines about the blind spots and flaws of the slick-magazine culture and why it was that George finally had to fail. Kennedy began with the best of intentions. His thought was, apparently, that people are less interested in politicians than film stars. So if he covered politicians as if they were film stars, people would want to read about them. “It would be a political magazine for people turned off by political magazines,” Blow informs us. “The country’s first mass-market political journal.” To this end, editors were picked, not from political journals, but from magazines like Mademoiselle and Mirabella–picked, as it were, for their general ignorance, so that nothing the editors commissioned would ever be over anyone’s head. Almost at once, two things went wrong. The first was that too many political heavyweights did not lend themselves to movie-star treatments, which meant that George ended up running far too many silly features about young staffers. The second was that, while Kennedy hoped to inspire the public, the years 1995 to 1999 were short on inspiring causes and long on scandal and farce. Clinton’s impeachment was great entertainment, but the son of one of our more libidinous presidents had no stomach for tweaking the thong-snappers, and George missed its opportunity. Blow and Kennedy seemed to have thought they were breaking new ground in the publishing world, although, as a matter of fact, they were not. George was never a political magazine, but a celebrity magazine that focused on politics, and its best pieces–and it did run some good ones–were identical to those in Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair, however, placed its political pieces in a general mixture of style, business, and arts, into which such politics-as-style essays fit nicely. George’s effort to stretch the idea over the breadth of an entire magazine strained the connection between power and culture (which is what also did in Capital Style, a Washington-based George-like effort that likewise lived and died during the Clinton years). George in the end was too much like John-John himself: hedging its bets, refusing to commit, neither despising nor embracing but waffling in ambivalence about power. It was a magazine of half measures, and half measures just weren’t enough. –Noemie Emery A Good Fight by Sarah Brady (PublicAffairs, 258 pp., $25). It’s rare that a memoir leaves as many unanswered questions as Sarah Brady’s “A Good Fight.” Brady, America’s most prominent anti-gun activist, gives ample details about her husband’s medical care, her own battle with cancer, and even her experiences rearing a learning-disabled child. But when it comes to firearms, she’s almost silent. Even her transformation from the shy wife of Ronald Reagan’s press secretary to the leader of a powerful special-interest group is hardly discussed. Despite all this, “A Good Fight” is an interesting read. Describing the treatment of her husband Jim’s injuries (sustained in the course of John Hinckley’s attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life), Brady mixes deeply personal detail with genuinely inspiring stories about her family’s efforts to stay together. Along the way, she takes pot-shots at gun “extremists” (a word she uses at least 30 times) and insists, without evidence, that 95 percent of Americans support her agenda. She never addresses the possibility that some citizens might want guns for self-defense, although she does declare–after calling for every sort of gun-ownership restriction–that “law-abiding citizens should be able to buy and keep firearms.” Perhaps she means it, but it’s hard to believe her. –Eli Lehrer
