I just finished True Compass, Ted Kennedy’s autobiography, which was hurried to print following his death last month. It’s an engrossing read with good capsule histories of some of the biggest events of our time. It has one of the better concise treatments of the Vietnam war and the LBJ years that I’ve read in recent years.

It isn’t an historian’s work, although Kennedy provides a lot of new detail about his own campaigns and big moments in the Senate: civil rights debates, health care during the Clinton years, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, to name a few.

It’s personal, but not tell-all. Most of the people Kennedy remembers with detail and skill are dead, but there is little or nothing in the 500-plus pages that would cause any spinning-in-their-graves. Think about that and ask yourself how often it happens. Answer: Not often. Most “celebrity” bios and autobios exist to set the record straight…from the author’s point of view, of course. The treatment of the Chappaquiddick disaster offers no new facts; it is convincing and sorrowful.

Kennedy wrote with the pride of a long-serving public servant, the gratitude of one looking back at a much-chronicled and very privileged life; and the deep regrets of a man who is taking his own measure with death just around the next corner.