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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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