Juicy account of a shocking scandal.
New York contributing editor Gordon interviewed more than 230 people to craft this readable soap opera about a wealthy family wracked by greed and animosity.
In 2006, the affairs of Brooke Astor splashed across tabloid front pages when her grandson Philip accused his father, Anthony Marshall, of elder abuse and sued to have him removed as the New York philanthropist’s guardian. Within months, Astor’s only child was charged with swindling millions from his 104-year-old mother’s estate. Lawyer Francis X. Morrisey Jr., who frequently escorted Mrs. Astor to benefits and parties, allegedly conspired with Tony Marshall to induce his mother to change her will to give Tony $60 million earmarked for charity. The heroes in this sordid tale are the hired help, who saw that the aging social arbiter was being taking advantage of and said so. “I was employed by Brooke Astor—my loyalty was to her,” said butler Chris Ely, who hinted to his boss’s friend David Rockefeller that things were awry. Taking us deep inside Mrs. Astor’s world, from her 14-room apartment at 778 Park Avenue and her 75-acre estate in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., to the board rooms of the Metropolitan Museum and other charities, the author describes the final dementia-wracked days of this beguiling, white-gloved narcissist, who died in 2007. She outlived three husbands (including Vincent Astor, who left her a fortune), disliked son Tony, a Broadway producer who managed her finances, and loathed his wife Charlene. Her affection went to grandsons Philip and Alec, both disappointments to their father. Readers will be saddened by the despair and paranoia of the philanthropist’s last days, cheer at the love and concern of her friends and take perverse pleasure in watching Tony ostracized at a charity event and forced to economize by firing his chauffeur and driving his own Toyota Prius. With the criminal case against her son and the challenges to her will yet to be resolved, Mrs. Astor lies in a Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., cemetery. Her headstone reads, “I had a wonderful life.”
Juicy account of a shocking scandal.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-89373-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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