A reverential biographical portrait and a window into 20th-century American aristocracy.
A rapturous biography of heiress and celebrated landscape gardener Rachel "Bunny" Mellon (1910-2014).
Vanity Fair contributor Gordon (The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark, 2014, etc.) vividly details how Mellon, whose paternal grandfather developed Listerine, was raised in an ultrawealthy milieu of fox hunting, posh boarding schools, and debutante balls. She was groomed to become a lady of excellent deportment; as adoringly described by the author, she was a "fresh blossom from a prominent family" who later married Paul Mellon (Mellon Bank), "the inheritor of a robber baron fortune." Gordon’s journalistic skill (she teaches at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute) is evident in her meticulous description of Mellon's lineage and long life, a portrait constructed through research into dozens of biographies, journals, and letters going back nearly a century. Readers of Gordon’s other books will certainly enjoy her portrayals of the amusements, travels, and exploits of Mellon's peers; as demonstrated by both Mrs. Astor Regrets and The Phantom of Fifth Avenue, the author has shown great facility in recounting upper-class lives, especially those of women. Though Mellon was an acclaimed landscaper and gardener and was regarded as a woman with "an extraordinary eye and curiosity,” she was hesitant when President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jackie implored her to redesign the White House Rose Garden. (Jackie lauded Mellon as "a visual genius.”) Gordon effectively details how Mellon transformed the "forlorn and outdated" garden into a courtyard showpiece by adding magnolia and an assortment of other trees, but her admiring descriptions are occasionally overwrought. Ultimately, Gordon heeded Mellon's directive that, above all, she produce a “friendly, non-gossipy" memoir and "be kind."
A reverential biographical portrait and a window into 20th-century American aristocracy.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8874-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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