Other authors...have ably chronicled this epic saga, but none has told the tale of the 35th president’s formative years better or more thoroughly than the Harvard history professor Fredrik Logevall in JFK,.

...remarkable rivalries within the Kennedy family – propelled by valour, vanity and greed – form the backbone of volume one of Frederik Logevall’s riveting life of JFK, which takes the story up to 1956. They serve as a vignette of American history in the middle years of the 20th century, where valour, vanity and greed were also the driving forces.

... as Fredrik Logevall shows in his superb JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956, Kennedy was a far deeper, worthier, more interesting character than the familiar revisionist cliche.

... this book is very good.

This is the first of two volumes by a Pulitzer-winning Harvard professor of the highest gifts, and the most compelling biography I have read in years.

... in the long run, Mr. Logevall labors a little too strenuously to persuade readers that Kennedy was more than the product of his family’s privilege and his own ambition and modest talents as intellect and interpreter of the world. The facts of his evident sexual appeal are repeated, and repeated again, with undue emphasis; his undergraduate insights and gathering worldview in office are recorded in admiring abundance. JFK is replete with testimonials to his ample qualities, yet nearly all of them are post-mortem assessments from the Kennedy circle.

It is a testament to Logevall’s talents as a writer and historian that he’s able to demystify JFK the legend but keep John F. Kennedy the person interesting. He allows us to delve into the world of the Kennedy family and be swept along by the story without getting carried away by the myth. Logevall is an elegant stylist.

The young John F. Kennedy was no callow playboy but a serious and self-directed man, according to this sweeping first installment in a planned two-volume biography.

A comprehensive life of John F. Kennedy...the first of two volumes.