Word: kelley
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...Kelley shows little grasp of Nancy Reagan's real contributions to the Administration. The First Lady was an astute political adviser on many matters. She played an important role, for instance, in getting Reagan to realize the severity of the trouble his presidency was in over the Iran-contra scandal...
...Kelley wrongly implies Nancy Reagan had a major hand in shaping foreign policy. In one encounter described in the book, President Reagan's aides showed him an agenda for his Geneva summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. The President asked whether the agenda had been shown to Nancy yet. No, he was told. "Get back to me after she's passed on it," he said. The reason for his concern was almost certainly Nancy's obsession with coordinating his schedule with the astrological charts -- a revelation that came out years ago. But Kelley uses the incident to imply, misleadingly, that...
Others point out, however, that Kelley's approach is becoming increasingly common in today's gossip-obsessed press. Gay Talese, author of The Kingdom and the Power, attacked the "holier-than-thou" attitude of many journalists over Kelley's work. "What Kitty Kelley represents is what most newspaper and magazine reporting is all about," he said. "Anyone in journalism who criticizes Kitty Kelley should examine themselves first...
...problem here may be one of definition. Kelley's book falls short of the standards of serious biography: it is too sloppy in its scholarship, too uncritical of its sources, too single-minded in its pursuit of the sensational and salacious. In a sense, the book is a compilation of the sort of speculation, freewheeling opinions and water-cooler gossip that journalists hear every day but that rarely make it into the news pages. As such, it has an understandable fascination -- and possibly some historical validity. Water- cooler gossip, after all, is not only entertaining. Sometimes it contains pieces...
From what you know of Nancy Reagan: An Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, which of these words describes the book...