"Pulitzer Prize-winner Eileen McNamara brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver out from her brothers' shadows to reveal an officious, cigar-smoking, fast-driving, indefatigable woman who was a shrewd player in the careers of Jack, Bobby, and Ted, a complicated wife to Sargent, an oft-neglected daughter of Rose, and a fiercely devoted but emotionally aloof mother to her five children. Granted access to never-before-seen private papers, including the scrapbooks Eunice kept as a schoolgirl in prewar London, McNamara paints an extraordinary portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and out of step with it: the visionary founder of Special Olympics, a devout Catholic in a secular age, and a formidable woman whose impact on American society was longer-lasting than that of any of the Kennedy men."--Jacket.