RaveAir MailGross closes his illuminating history in the twilight of the WASP ascendancy, when hysterias that were once the luxury of the few pervaded the lives of the many. It is the virtue of his book that it brings the now defunct patricians to life in all their doubleness, begetters of American prosperities who drove themselves crazy trying to heal American hysterias.
Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe
PositiveAir MailCooper and Howe continue their chronicle of upper-crust degeneracy ... In disposing of his own class demons so mercilessly, Cooper becomes much the most interesting character in his book, though he does not connect his defection with those of other WASPs in search of therapeutic absolution.
Natalie Livingstone
PositiveAir MailEntrancing ... Livingstone half-heartedly costumes her heroines as contemporary figures whose vision of \'gender and sexuality\' was innocent of all \'binary\' simplemindedness, but her gossip-feast of a book is really about the survival, in the ostensibly rational world of finance, of enchantments one would have thought had gone the way of sorcery and alchemy.
Neal Thompson
PositiveAir Mail... splendidly heterodox ... Thompson brilliantly illuminates the strain of Mariolatry in the Kennedys that Bridget embodied....But Thompson goes wrong in framing the Kennedy story as a melodrama of Irish grievance. The most piercingly obvious fact about the family is that they were keen to join established elites.
Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe
PositiveAir Mail[An] engaging and, indeed, suspenseful study of Cooper’s gilded relations ... Cooper and Howe string together these diverting portraits on a luminous thread, \'the loaded promises of the American dream\' ... The book, however, will undoubtedly be read not as a cautionary tale but, like The Great Gatsby, as a how-to manual, as our discontented citizenry hysterically chases a golden calf that continually eludes it.
