The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (2012) is the definitive biography of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw, the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist whose previous works include the Bancroft Prize-winning The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst and the Pulitzer-nominated Andrew Carnegie. Nasaw, the only biographer granted unrestricted access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, tracks Kennedy's astonishing passage from East Boston outsider to supreme Washington insider, his seemingly limitless ambition driving his career through banking, World War I shipyard management, Hollywood studio direction, Wall Street operations, New Deal presidential advising, and founding chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission, before his astounding fall from grace in the years leading up to and following America's entry into the Second World War, when his antiwar position as the first Irish American ambassador to London made him the subject of White House ire and popular distaste. The book was selected by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of 2012 and was a 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, with Christopher Buckley in the New York Times Book Review calling it riveting and hard to put down and the Boston Globe describing it as the sort of biography that begs to be called magisterial.