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    "description": "<b><b>&ldquo;One of the truly great biographies of our time.&rdquo;&mdash;Sean Wilentz, <i>New York Times </i>bestselling author of <i>Bob Dylan in America</i> and <i>The Rise of American Democracy</i></b> <br>&#160; <br><b>&ldquo;A landmark study of Washington power politics in the twentieth century in the Robert Caro tradition.&rdquo;&mdash;Douglas Brinkley, <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>American Moonshot<br></i></b> <br>The epic, definitive biography of Ted Kennedy&mdash;an immersive journey through the life of a complicated man and a sweeping history of the fall of liberalism and the collapse of political morality.</b><br>&#160;<br><i>Catching the Wind&#160;</i>is the first volume of Neal Gabler&rsquo;s magisterial two-volume biography of Edward Kennedy. It is at once a human drama, a history of American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a study of political morality and the role it played in the tortuous course of liberalism.&#160;<br>&#160;<br>Though he is often portrayed as a reckless hedonist who rode his father&rsquo;s fortune and his brothers&rsquo; coattails to a Senate seat at the age of thirty, the Ted Kennedy in <i>Catching the Wind</i> is one the public seldom saw&mdash;a man both racked by and driven by insecurity, a man so doubtful of himself that he sinned in order to be redeemed. The last and by most contemporary accounts the least of the Kennedys, a lightweight. He lived an agonizing childhood, being shuffled from school to school at his mother&rsquo;s whim, suffering numerous humiliations&mdash;including self-inflicted ones&mdash;and being pressed to rise to his brothers&rsquo; level. He entered the Senate with his colleagues&rsquo; lowest expectations, a show horse, not a workhorse, but he used his &ldquo;ninth-child&rsquo;s talent&rdquo; of deference to and comity with his Senate elders to become a promising legislator. And with the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, he was compelled to become something more: the custodian of their political mission.<br>&#160;<br>In&#160;<i>Catching the Wind</i>, Kennedy, using his late brothers&rsquo; moral authority, becomes a moving force in the great &ldquo;liberal hour,&rdquo; which sees the passage of the anti-poverty program and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, with the election of Richard Nixon, he becomes the leading voice of liberalism itself at a time when its power is waning: a &ldquo;shadow president,&rdquo; challenging Nixon to keep the American promise to the marginalized, while Nixon lives in terror of a Kennedy restoration. <i>Catching the Wind</i> also shows how Kennedy&rsquo;s moral authority is eroded by the fatal auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, dealing a blow not just to Kennedy but to liberalism.<br>&#160;<br>In this sweeping biography, Gabler tells a story that is Shakespearean in its dimensions: the story of a star-crossed figure who rises above his seeming limitations and the tragedy that envelopes him to change the face of America.",
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