... exhaustively researched and elegantly written ... In addition to her expertise in horticulture, Griswold drew on her personal familiarity with the Mellon family ... With the book’s breaks in chronology, characters sometimes ricochet through it ... Notwithstanding her extreme discretion, Griswold sees Mellon ultimately as an impresario and a showman who theatrically created one spectacular work of fantasy after another. She sure had quite a run.
Griswold writes with close enough range that she quotes from a number of Mellon’s private writings, many of which were drafted with a memoir in mind, but enough distance to tell us, for example, that Mellon’s wardrobe was "sometimes admirable, sometimes perilously close to dowdy".
