*News and Reviews* — Neal Thompson

2023:

-crickets-

(working on new books)

2022:

The First Kennedys selected: NPR “Books We Love” for 2022 and Amazon Best Book of the Year (top 100 and top 20 in history).
My stories on immigration, nativism, etc, at Washington Post and Time; my LitHub piece on research, LDS, Newspapers.com.
Kennedy Forum talk/Q&A on C-Span.
Reviews, interviews, and roundups: Associated Press; New York Post; New York Times; New York Daily News; History News Network; Florida Times-Union; and The Boston Globe (“a chronicle that ranks with the richly evocative work of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Thomas H. O’Connor“).
Interview with People. (“Meet JFK's Great-Grandma: Her Ambition Begat America's Most Famous Family but Was Nearly Overlooked”) - plus a story about JFK pretending to smoke grandpa P.J.’s cigar.
Excerpt featured in Town & Country; excerpt in the Boston Globe Magazine.
Recorded interviews: JFK Library Forum, with author and professor Christine Kinealy; National Archives, with author Neal Bascomb; at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Watchung Booksellers, with author and NY Times reporter Kate Zernike; Elliott Bay Book Co., with author Alexis Coe.
Reviewed in Airmail: (“Now comes Neal Thompson, who in his splendidly heterodox The First Kennedys shows that before the lurid patriarchy of Joe there was the winning matriarchy of Bridget.”)
Selected by Amazon editors as top-10 Best Books of the Month (“penetrating prose studded with information and insight”); also featured in Business Insider. Plus an interview with the Amazon Book Review.
Podcast interviews: the JFK35 podcast (with Matt Porter, at the JFK Library Foundation); Kennedy Dynasty Podcast (video / audio); Abe Books; The Chris Voss Show; The Curious Man Podcast; interview with Irish Central editor Cahir O’Doherty. (“Bridget Kennedy emerges as such a formidable woman in Thompson's telling.”)
Radio interviews: Boston Public Radio, WGBH; WAMC’s “The Roundtable”; Nightside with Dan Rea; the Jefferson Exchange; Dublin NewsTalk radio with Sean Moncrieff; the WGVU Morning Show with Shelley Irwin; Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen; Indiana in the Morning; Talk Louisiana; WGTD Morning Show (Kenosha, WI); “Conversations,” with Dan Skinner, Kansas Public Radio.
Trade reviews: Kirkus (“a lively biography”); Publishers Weekly (“illuminating … engrossing”); Booklist (“engaging … history buffs should pick up this book immediately”); Library Journal (starred review - “winsomely written … both an absorbing family story and a saga of the Irish diaspora in Boston”); Shelf Awareness (“thoroughly researched and vividly imagined … an inspired addition to a mostly talked-out topic.”)