Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy

No figure in American public life has had such great expectations thrust upon him, or has responded so poorly.

But Ted Kennedy -- the youngest of the Kennedy children and the son who felt the least pressure to satisfy his father' s enormous ambitions -- would go on to live a life that no one could have predicted: dismissed as a spent force in politics by the time he reached middle age, Ted became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation's keeper of traditional liberalism.