The rags-to-riches story of the first Kennedys to set foot in the U.S. is depicted in sweeping style by author Neal Thompson in The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty. Thompson (Kickflip Boys) introduces readers to Bridget Murphy, a young woman who escaped the blighted fields of Ireland during the Great Irish Potato Famine to establish a new life in the U.S. in 1849. Finding work in Boston as a maid (a common lot for Irish immigrant women), she soon met and married another immigrant, the longshoreman Patrick Kennedy. Widowed after almost 10 years of marriage, Bridget pluckily worked her way up, from maid to hairdresser to owning her own grocery business. Her industrious son, P.J. Kennedy, followed in her footsteps. He established several lucrative liquor businesses and made enough contacts to become a prominent Democratic boss, active in Boston politics for many decades.
Thompson powerfully re-creates the experiences of Irish immigrants in the mid-to-late 19th century. Endemic to the "shanty Irish" were racism and discrimination, brutal working conditions and crushing poverty. With access to previously unpublished papers of P.J. Kennedy, Thompson ushers these lesser-known Kennedys into the stage lights: Bridget, the widowed self-made business owner, and P.J., civic leader and future grandfather of the first Irish-Catholic American president. They laid the foundations for the brilliant American Kennedy dynasty, a Camelot of glamour cursed with Shakespearean tragedy. This study of the earliest Kennedys, both thoroughly researched and vividly imagined, is an inspired addition to a mostly talked-out topic. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver, Colo.