Reviewer ripostes
Sir: Although I was of course pleased to see the name of the widow of one of Britain's very best post-war journalists (Patrick O'Donovan) figuring in your post-bag (12 October), I was sorry to read of her dissat- isfaction with my recent review of Jacque- line Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir (28 September) as well as her failure, even approximately accurately, to count the number of references to its subject. The author of this book, though he failed to dis- close the fact, had long since been declared by his subject to be persona non grata, either in the flesh, in print or in any other form of communication. Little wonder that that most distinguished and literate of con- temporary Americans, the former US Ambassador Raymond Seitz (now in hopes of being released from his enforced, dog- bound UK residence by the adoption across the English Channel of the system satisfac- torily working in Sweden) should have writ- ten in the Sunday Telegraph of 'this little wisp of a book . . a puffy, little cloud in the literary sky . . . We really don't know much more about her [Jackie] at the end of the book than we did at the beginning'. But when the widow O'Donovan expressed boredom with the whole subject, I offered her my own copy of a book, fortunately still available in hard or paperback in every Excuse me, have you got a light?' public library, Ari by Peter Evans, that excellently written and researched Meister- werk covering the whole Greek multimil- lionaire mafia and its extraordinary civil war with its cruel but socially snobbish Turk-born rival, Onassis, who was only, in Greek tragedy fashion, to meet final frus- tration and death after allowing himself to be fatally stung by one of America's last but hungriest Wasps.
Alastair Forbes
1837 Château-d'Oex, Switzerland
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