Praise for Twilight of Camelot: The Short Life and Long Legacy of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy
“Historian, biographer, and journalist Levingston (Kennedy and King, 2017) casts welcome light onto an often-eclipsed chapter in the Kennedy saga. . . . A fresh and empathic perspective to a tragic loss.” —Booklist, starred review
“The book offers a bird’s-eye view that affords sympathy for the family and presents JFK as a changed man, both personally and professionally. It showcases Levingston’s knack for narrative history, reinforcing the strength of his previous presidential studies of Kennedy and Obama.” —Library Journal, starred review
“A poignant contribution to Kennedy lore.” —Kirkus
“Twilight of Camelot tells, with nuance and immediacy, the story of the short life of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy—and its lasting aftereffects, including in the field of neonatal medicine. Steven Levingston has long been a first-class chronicler of the Kennedy years, and he shows it once again in this sterling book.” —Fredrik Logevall, author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956
“Steven Levingston’s Twilight of Camelot movingly illuminates the heart rendering saga of the death of President John F. and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s infant son in 1963. This narrative stands as a testimonial to the Kennedys’ stoic courage, Catholic faith and iron-willed endurance. Elegantly written and brilliantly researched, this history-driven lament of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy is an essential addition in the U.S. presidential history field writ large. Highly recommended!” —Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race
“With a keen reporter’s eye and masterful narrative skill, Steven Levingston gives us an intimate account of the twilight of Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s marriage and how they lost a baby son. It is a heart-rending story, but also surprisingly hopeful about what can come from tragedy.” —Evan Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of Robert Kennedy: His Life
“This is a tender, deeply reported story of love reborn after a grief that spares no one. Steven Levingston combines the full force of his talents as a veteran journalist with the grace and wonder of a writer at his peak. Finally, we know how Patrick Bouvier Kennedy’s tragically short life launched a medical movement that saves the lives of millions of premature babies every year. This is the hope we crave.” —Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of The Daughters of Erietown
“A moving account of the long medical shadow cast by the very short life of the Kennedy White House baby, tracing the story through personal and political history and reminding us how recent and remarkable is the ability to care for premature and critically ill newborns.” —Perri Klass, MD, professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and author of The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future
Also by Steven Levingston:
Reviews:
Barack and Joe: The Making of an Extraordinary Partnership
“Levingston, a gifted diviner of our political ethos and an eloquent chronicler of our national tendencies, delves purposefully into the relationship between Obama and Biden, showing how it was the magical melding of two forceful personalities who were quite dissimilar in many ways, but no less capable of turning their differences into national benefit.”―Michael Eric Dyson, from the foreword of Barack and Joe
“Levingston weaves a lively narrative about an unlikely alliance between the taciturn Obama and gregarious, voluble Biden.” ―Kirkus Reviews
Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights
“Steven Levingston’s Kennedy and King is an unqualified masterpiece of historical narrative. Every page sparkles with literary verve, eloquent storytelling, and keen analytic judgment. It might be the best dual biography I’ve ever read. A landmark achievement which elevates civil rights history into a high art form.”
― Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of Rosa Parks and The Reagan Diaries
“Levingston . . . contrasts the unstoppable forces of King’s soaring oratory, Christian principles, and moral authority with the immovable objects of Kennedy’s privilege, political calculation, and presidential power. Their push and pull unfolded in a cultural cauldron that encompassed the Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom rides, King’s stints in jail, the children’s crusade in Birmingham, Gov. George Wallace’s segregationist stand at the University of Alabama, and the march on Washington.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A riveting episode in American history.” —Booklist (starred review)
Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Époque Paris
“Levingston has unearthed a whopper of a story, and lovingly crafted a dense, lyrical yarn that hits the true-crime trifecta of setting, story and so-what. Such books remind us that times may change, but the human animal does not.”
—The New York Times
“Levingston, who is nonfiction book editor of the Washington Post and knows a good story when he sees one, has given it a richly enjoyable telling. Its lurid and improbable plot twists are expertly transposed into a breathless true-crime thriller set against a sumptuous evocation of the boulevards, nightclubs and boudoirs of Belle Époque Paris.”
—Wall Street Journal
“International journalist and Washington Post nonfiction book editor Levingston uses the story of a murder by a foolish girl and her lover to illustrate another side of belle epoque Paris. The author foregoes the tabloid excesses and exploitation of lurid details from that time and focuses on the debate as to whether a person is capable of committing a crime under hypnosis or even post-hypnotic suggestion.” ―Kirkus Reviews
Steven Levingston 