At the end of his deeply affecting memoir, the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy writes about his grandson “Little Teddy”—the son of his son “Medium Teddy” who delivered such a heartbreaking eulogy at the senator’s funeral on Saturday—and his difficulties mastering the family tradition of sailing. The senator told the 10-year-old “we might not be the best,” but “we can work harder than anyone,” and Little Teddy stayed with it, grew eager to learn and started winning races. That, the senator writes, “is the greatest lesson anyone can learn”: that if you “stick with it,” that if, as the title of his book suggests, you keep a “true compass” and do your best, you will eventually “get there.”

And that, in a sense, is the theme of this heartfelt autobiography: that persistence, perseverance and patience in pursuit of a cause or atonement for one’s failures can lead to achievement and the possibility of redemption. It’s the story of how this youngest and most underestimated of siblings slowly, painfully, incrementally found genuine purpose of his own in shouldering the weighty burden of familial expectations and the duty of carrying on his slain brothers’ work. He found a purpose, not as they did in the high-altitude pursuit of the presidency but in the dogged, daily grind of being a senator—of laboring over bills, of sitting through endless committee meetings, of wading through briefing books and making deals with members across the aisle. The resulting legislation—including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program of 1997—would help the poor and the disenfranchised and those with disabilities, and win him recognition as one of the foremost legislators in American history. ... (Read the full review)

Like The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Ted Kennedy's True Compass was written in the last months of its author's life as he struggled against an unknown deadline imposed by terminal cancer. Like Grant, Kennedy sought to be modest about the successes in his long public life and honest about the failures. Like Grant's, his memoir has been published soon (if not, in fact, with unseemly haste) after its author's death to a flurry of attention and impressive sales, exceeded at the moment only by the latest amusement from Dan Brown.

Beyond these, resemblances are difficult to come by. True Compass is an engaging and at times moving book, but like virtually all political autobiographies these days, it has the air of having been written by committee. Grant did have the assistance of researchers as he plumbed his memory for details of his service in the Mexican and Civil Wars, but he wrote the book himself, in longhand, and it is an American classic. True Compass, by contrast, was cobbled together from oral histories, notebooks that Kennedy kept over the years and extensive interviews. It is not always possible to tell where Kennedy's voice ends and that of his capable collaborator, Ron Powers, begins. ... (Read the full review)

The Kennedy legacy has long rested on the shoulders of its two most glowing sons: He Who Was President (John) and He Who Could Have Been (Bobby). Yet it may be He Who Never Was—Teddy, the youngest in the nine-sibling Kennedy brood—who has had the most lasting impact. In this memoir, finished before he died of brain cancer on Aug. 25, the Massachusetts Senator draws on half a century's worth of journal entries and other notes to reconstruct a life full of seemingly endless tribulations. True Compass covers the violent deaths of his three older brothers, the unforgivable mess of Chappaquiddick and the tawdry William Kennedy Smith rape trial, while providing a picture of life in the claustrophobic Kennedy clan—an airtight hothouse of ambitious and competitive men and women. But it's clear that Kennedy hoped to be remembered best for his trailblazing Senate career, in which he championed legislation like the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. ... (Read the full review)