McGinniss's book "The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy" was published in 1993. The volume was widely panned for its skimpy sourcing, lack of attribution, wild suppositions, lack of footnotes, possible plagiarism and prurient outlook. In "The New York Times", Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it "half-baked" and added, "The book isn't bad; it's awful". "It is, by a wide margin, the worst book I have reviewed in nearly three decades; quite simply, there is not an honest page in it," wrote Jonathan Yardley in "The Washington Post." Yardley called it "a genuinely, unrelievedly rotten book, one without a single redeeming virtue, an embarrassment that should bring nothing except shame to everyone associated with it." He also characterized it as "slimy, meretricious and cynical." Also in the "Post", Richard Cohen wrote, "This is not biography; this is pornography." "McGinniss concludes that the Kennedys are all-American frauds," wrote "Publishers Weekly". "The reader will wonder if McGinniss isn't one also." James Atlas wrote that the book was, "even by the standards of celebrity journalism, a sordid spectacle." In "The New Republic", Joe Klein called it an "odiography."