Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir
    Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir
    Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir
    Audiobook9 hours

    Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir

    Written by Wendy Burden

    Narrated by Coleen Marlo

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius "The Commodore" Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy Burden's birth, the Burdens had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed bluebloods on the verge of financial and moral decline-and were rarely seen not holding a drink.

    In Dead End Gene Pool, Wendy invites listeners to meet her tragically flawed family, including an uncle with a fondness for Hitler, a grandfather who believes you can never have enough household staff, and a remarkably flatulent grandmother. At the heart of the story is Wendy's glamorous and aloof mother, who, after her husband's suicide, travels the world in search of the perfect sea and ski tan, leaving her three children in the care of a chain-smoking Scottish nanny, Fifth Avenue grandparents, and an assorted cast of long-suffering household servants (who Wendy and her brothers love to terrorize). Rife with humor, heartbreak, family intrigue, and booze, Dead End Gene Pool offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of old money and gives truth to an old maxim: The rich are different.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 12, 2010
    ISBN9781400185696
    Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir

    Related to Dead End Gene Pool

    Related audiobooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Richest Girl In The World

      Aug 12, 2020

      The Richest Girl In The World
      10 min read

    • Article

      Before WALLIS

      Sep 7, 2018

      Before WALLIS
      5 min read

    • Article

      Wives’ Tales

      Nov 30, 2018

      Wives’ Tales
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Husband Hunters

      Feb 9, 2024

      The Husband Hunters
      5 min read

    • Article

      TV & RADIO

      Mar 10, 2020

      TV & RADIO
      3 min read

    • Article

      Crazy For Cider

      Aug 25, 2021

      JAMES CROWDEN is a poet, shepherd and total cider nut. In this, at least his third book on the subject, there is no other drink but that it suffers from his passion for cider, apple brandy and cider’s delicate, sweet sister, perry—and almost no momen

      5 min read

    • Article

      Enid Lindeman DEATH BECOMES HER

      Jul 15, 2020

      Enid Lindeman DEATH BECOMES HER
      8 min read

    • Article

      Devon, Droves And Jacobites

      Apr 11, 2020

      Devon, Droves And Jacobites
      13 min read

    • Article

      ‘My Ancestors Were mps With Royal Connections’

      Dec 28, 2023

      YOUR CELEBRATING DISCOVERIES As she posted off her DNA test, Lynsey Ford had no idea of the amazing family secrets it would help her unlock. She would go on to discover ancestors who were members of Parliament, bishops and authors, and who had links

      5 min read

    • Article

      Dear Paul

      Sep 9, 2022

      In August we heard about the delightfully-named Morwood Windle, who had the rather unsavoury occupation of ‘pig killer’. Although probably not seen as a desirable occupation nowadays, put into context, this occupation would have been more common in 1

      11 min read

    • Article

      Men Overboard

      Dec 6, 2019

      Men Overboard
      5 min read

    • Article

      Noble Ambitions By Adrian Tinniswood Review – Classy Tour Of The Country House

      Oct 18, 2021

      When the market for stately homes all but vanished in the years after the second world war, desperate measures were required. Boom! “If you need to dynamite a country house, do it early on a Monday morning,” instructed the Marquess of Normanby, thoug

      4 min read

    • Article

      Mad Dogs & Englishmen

      Mar 6, 2020

      Mad Dogs & Englishmen
      7 min read

    • Article

      Enid Lindeman DEATH BECOMES HER

      Jul 15, 2020

      Enid Lindeman DEATH BECOMES HER
      8 min read

    • Article

      Legacies of Slavery

      Dec 23, 2021

      Legacies of Slavery
      11 min read

    • Article

      Affairs Of The Heart

      Mar 3, 2021

      Affairs Of The Heart
      4 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 national Trust Houses

      Aug 24, 2023

      Top 10 national Trust Houses
      8 min read

    • Article

      Take a GRAND TOUR

      Sep 15, 2022

      Take a GRAND TOUR
      7 min read

    • Article

      Coot Hill

      Aug 10, 2023

      Coot Hill
      4 min read

    • Article

      Bird’s Words

      Aug 7, 2023

      The other night I had a dream that I was helping a much-respected person I knew to make a large meal for 50 Big Issue vendors and staff. Things seemed to work well. Then it went badly wrong and the well-respected person got angry and threw everything

      4 min read

    • Article

      Winston Churchill

      Feb 5, 2020

      Winston Churchill
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Dead End Gene Pool

    3.5/5

    140 ratings35 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this quirky tale of the eccentrically wealthy. One often imagines what it must be like growing up in the upper echelons of American society, and Wendy Burden shows that it can sometimes come with some pretty high costs. However, her tone throughout is engaging and lighthearted, allowing the reader to laugh at the appalling and recognize that she came through it in the end with a strong sense of self. This memoir reminded me a bit of Sean Wilsey's "Oh The Glory of it All:" In the process of reading it, you find yourself amazed that these people were real. It falls into the same category of memoirs that unveil the skeletons hidden in the grandest and most well-appointed closets of our culture.
    • 4/5
      Highly entertaining. Too see first hand how the ultra ultra wealthy lived is always fascinating to me.
    • 4/5
      From My Blog...Dysfunctional families are not uncommon and while the stories usually will bear some similarities very few are told of the wealthiest of families, at least not before Wendy Burden's memoir Dead End Gene Pool. Burden's great-great-great-great grandfather was none other than Cornelius Vanderbilt and his eccentricities and proclivities apparently lived on throughout the generations. Wendy's father, William Armistead Moale Burden III died when she was 6 years old, changing her world, but not in the ordinary way a parent's death might change a child. Rather Wendy and her brothers traveled quite often to stay with their grandparents as dictated by their attorneys after their son's death. From the beginning it is clear to see that Wendy is starved for attention and goes to great lengths to achieve recognition, including but not limited to decapitating dolls and dissecting dolls. Her older brother was given weekly therapy sessions when their father passed, however, she was not, for which she was quite envious and I do think in desperate need of. Burden paints a life without parents, however her mother was not dead but instead, off traveling the world and the children often stayed with their grandmother, who apparently was prone to flatulence as it is mentioned quite often along with grandfather, a man who valued having numerous servants, land, and boys. While the Burden children grew up surrounded by servants as well as a governess, extravagant gifts, and extremely eccentric family members, many of which were alcoholics, and siblings, something was lacking in Wendy's life. It is a rare occurrence for me to come across a memoir I am not completely absorbed into, yet I did have difficulties feeling anything for the characters in this memoir, which to me is quite telling of Wendy's childhood. While Burden uses witty comments to keep her memoir light, it is a rather sad commentary that people with the means for help could not offer help to the ones needing it the most. Dead End Gene Pool left me feeling empty and depressed, which is quite possibly how Wendy often found herself. The memoir itself is well written yet even with a lighter tone and the added wit the reader must be cautioned the tale is not always a happy one, yet one well worth reading, especially for those who enjoy history and memoirs.
    • 4/5
      This book is a bit like the train wreck you can't take your eyes off. It certainly demonstrates that even extreme wealth cannot make everything better. On some pages, it is fascinating (like active monkeys at the zoo) - the rich really do live differently. But the book shows a striking dichotomy of life that The author lived. When with her uber-rich paternal grandparents, she had access to the life of luxury, but when she was with her mother at home - they often lived (in later years) in near squalor. The thread that runs through both sides of the family is alcoholism (and other substance abuse). Like other reviewers, I wish more family photos had been included. It is a great fast read when you need something truly different to shake things up.
    • 5/5
      Hilarious! I only wish Wendy had included pictures of her family.
    • 3/5
      “Sepulchrally dismal, she was the three-dimensional equivalent of woe.”My third memoir for the year, Wendy Burden’s Dead End Gene Pool is a dizzying ride through the lives of the ultra-rich descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt, starting briefly with her grandparents’ antecedents, focussing for quite some time on Wendy’s childhood, which was heavily influenced by her paternal grandparents, and moving into her teenage and student years.The first half of this book was highly comic – Wendy recounting the tales of her forebears, over-moneyed, over-sexed and often under-endowed with sanity. Similarly the stories of her early childhood, mostly revolving around her grandparents and their staff at the New York mansion. As Wendy grows older, though, the anecdotes get a bitter edge and the book becomes one of those ubiquitous misery memoirs of growing up with an alcoholic single parent. The grandparents become senile and sadly dependent, rather than amusing.Memoirs are clearly a form of non-fiction that I am coming to enjoy, though – I very much enjoyed Sleeping Naked Is Green and The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance (when I wrote that review, I hoped I’d never have to write the title again. It seems to be following me).Worth reading if you are interested in rich American people. Otherwise, there’s funnier material out there.
    • 3/5
      Great for 3/4 but gets tiring toward the end. Excessively dysfunctional family of mind boggling wealth.
    • 5/5
      So few books I can say I actually have laughed out loud! All about a privileged family, part of the Vanderbilt clan, that becomes harder and harder to hide from society. The author makes the story very funny and interesting. Sort of a "be careful what you wish for" thing.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book. It was funny and touching at the same time. It's a quick but good read. I would definitely recommend it!
    • 3/5
      Another true tale of family dysfunction and neglect but this time the neglected child is a Vanderbilt and the neglect comes packaged in mink coats and fabulous trips to Paris. Supposedly 'darkly humorous and satirical' I found this book interesting (as in watching a car crash interesting) but in the end I just didn't care about Wendy Burden or her tragic life - perhaps because she never really lets you in on her emotions but rather writes a series of vignettes about her alcoholic grandparents, her alcoholic mother, her drug addicted uncles, her confused brothers etc etc. Yes, an unfortunate and lonely childhood and not one I would wish on anyone but in the end she couldn't make me care.
    • 4/5
      Excellently entertaining, in the rubbernecking car crash way I think the book was intended. Never have I been so glad to be lower middle class and from a well-adjusted family. It's hard to tell how reliable this narrator actually is, as she switches seamlessly from the drama of her younger self to future recollections. But really, it's HER story of HER experience with HER cuckoo wealthy family rather than an accurate chronicle.
    • 4/5
      Everyone believes they come from a dysfunctional family of sorts, but Wendy Burden's tales convincingly places hers in a top tier. Her account of her ultra rich family's indulgences and shocking neglect of one another provides shivers of schadenfreude. Suicide and alcoholism only scrape the surface. Burden writes unapologtically and entertainingly. (Laughed out loud over her rendering of Concorde flight to Paris searted next to Jacques Cousteau who became miffed when she failed to feel him up.) So many reviewers playfully cite F. SCott Fitzgerald's "the rich are different than you and me" to describe this book. To this I might add another favorite from The Great Gatsby: "...as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."
    • 4/5
      What a brilliant tale of the uber rich and uber indugled and what a sad, sad, sad life they have.Wendy is the great great great great great grandaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and both sides have long illustrious lines of Americana.She is a brilliant storyteller with tales of too much money and not enough brains (or sense) for a family.
    • 3/5
      Do people really think that the wealthy are immune from family troubles? Is there anyone out there that thinks money buys happiness anymore? Because sometimes reading these tragic-family-memoirs involving the rich lead me to think that they think we're all putting them up on a pedestal as "model" families. However, it seems that growing up wealthy in an eccentric and dysfunction family is evidently reason enough to write a memoir. Strange family tales are all the rage these days, I understand, and Wendy Burden is a pretty good writer, so it wasn't terrible to read. It was actually pretty funny sometimes. Is it memorable? Not really. Is there some greater message being conveyed? Nope. She's not terribly angry at her family, or trying to reconcile her idea of them to the reality of them, or working out some deep-held emotional issues; she's just telling us some humorous, and sometimes tragic, stories about her wacky, incredibly rich family. I think the moral is this: you can have a lot of money and still have messed-up parents.
    • 3/5
      Hillarious memoir that completely defines people who have more money than sense.
    • 3/5
      Turns out the rich ARE different, and not in a good way. SO not in a good way. Wendy Burden's memoir of her childhood in the prison of Vanderbilt riches and expectations is touted as hilariously funny, and perhaps it is, if you can overlook the sheer tragedy of a small child trying to cope with a parent's suicide, rampant family alcoholism, her mother's sex addiction and other miseries too numerous to numerate. Call me bleeding heart, but I have several daughters, and I found this memoir, satirical, yes; often clever, yes; but funny? No, no, no. I wanted to snatch little Wendy and her brothers away from these monsters masquerading as loving family. She must be in her late forties now, but her voice is still the voice of a defiant adolescent, covering with bravado the heartbreak of living in a world without love.
    • 4/5
      In every memoir you have to decide: can I trust this narrator? Does this person remember her life clearly? Is she just trying to make her life look better/worse than it really was? Wendy Burden tackles this problem head on. Holding nothing back, Burden documents her deranged childhood with humor and guilt about her situation.After a brief family fascinating family history, Dead End Gene Pool takes us right into the depths of Burdenland-a world of the ultrarich and the ultradisturbed. Ironically, Burden handled all of this tragedy with satire. She mocked herself, and in that mocking I felt deeply sorry for her. My empathy for her and her life was not something I anticipated. I truly thought, “Oh, no. Here is another poor little rich girl story. Let’s hear about real tragedy.” But Burden’s use of comedy showed me that any life has tragedy. That sadness is sadness, and that (of course) money doesn’t make life better. In fact, it seems like lots of it makes life worse.This self effacing comedy is best demonstrated in Burden’s comments about her absent mother. Some of these observations were so funny that I laughed out loud, despite the heartbreak of the situation. For example, after a three year absence, Wendy’s baby brother is stunned to see his long lost mother. To describe this event, Burden says that, “baby Edward was surprised to discover that he was not, in fact, the miracle child of a Scottish nanny and an African-American cook.” The tragedies continue (too many to mention, too sad to think about), but her likability stayed until the last page.The neglect and the misfortune of these children would have been too much to handle without Burden’s humor, and her story would have been boring without the extreme excess. Swinging somewhere between indulgent and apologetic, Burden hit the nail on the head. I, unlike her mother, enjoyed my time in Burdenland. And I was happy to see they all got out alive, and I was very happy to give my normal, middle-class parents a big hug!
    • 4/5
      On finishing the book, I don't know how to describe Dead End Gene Pool except, to say, it was just plain odd. (For that reason alone, it receives a couple of stars). Some of this was absolutely hysterical--laugh out loud funny. There were parts I found very touching and sad. At times I just read it with a sense of disbelief. I have to say I gave up trying to keep (unnecessary) details of the family tree straight. That said, it was a quick and entertaining read. Congrats to Wendy Burden: for making it through such a convoluted set of personal life experiences...and then to write about those experiences in such a humorous and captivating way.
    • 3/5
      Wendy Burden’s account of her childhood traumas explains why social services exist today. If even half of the events in this book are true, I am surprised she has lived long enough to tell the tale and has not succumbed to some form of severe substance abuse or suicide. Her childhood, although materially rich by anybody’s standards, was pitifully poor in love, compassion, and most forms of normalcy. Reading this book truly made me thankful for the family that I have.However, the writing style in this book is prone to exaggeration, or so it seems. Sometimes I wondered if the events were retold as they actually happened, or if they were exaggerated for effect. Maybe both. Toward the middle of the book, it also seemed that the storyline became something of a one-trick pony. The shock value of the relatives' antics rubbed off after awhile, leaving the reader looking for some other form of action to fill the void. Unfortunately, there is none. The ending is not surprising, and there is not much to redeem from her family in the end.That being said, there were some sections that were brilliantly hilarious. I often found myself laughing out loud over Wendy’s interactions with the farting grandma and the grandpa who could only say, “Phooey.” I am not one to laugh out loud over things I watch or read, so to have multiple moments like this from one book is really quite an accomplishment. Overall, I found this book to be enjoyable, but it is not something that I would read a second time.
    • 1/5
      I may be in the minority here, but I really did NOT care for this book. I couldn't find anything of lasting interest in this memoir. It may be that the only reason it got published was because the author, Wendy Burdens, is descended from THE Vanderbilts. That wasn't enough to make it interesting to me. I was left wondering if she has any relatives left that even acknowledge her.
    • 5/5
      I loved this! No, really... I did. Wendy Burden has a self-deprecating twisted sense of humor. What's not to love? She's brutally honest about all her of her family's flaws without wallowing one bit in self pity. I'm not sure how she manages to pull it off, but pull it off she does. Yes, it's a 'poor little rich girl' type of tale, and yet I never get the impression she's looking for our pity, but instead just a bit of understanding. Her childhood was peopled with larger than life relatives, her paternal grandparents especially. I would warn you, if you don't have a sense of humor you might want to pass on this. The humor is what keeps it from being completely heartbreaking. Note: I read in an online interview that there will be more memoirs to come from Wendy Burden, and I am happy about that!
    • 3/5
      A few days after I finished this one, I realized that not much really happened in it, but that it really didn't matter as I found the book enjoyable anyway. A chronicle of the Vanderbilt family, and the effects of staggering wealth on its various members and associates, the humorous and often tragic character sketches are testament to the depleted energy and shaky moral character that remains in the family. Wendy Burden's account of her childhood spent with servants, often bitter and petty grandparents who hold the purse-strings, and a mother in search of romance and the perfect tan, is both entertaining and alarming as neglect and glitz combine in her life.
    • 2/5
      Let me start by saying I couldn't finish Dead End Gene Pool. I felt disengaged from the first chapter and never found my entrance into the material. Burden starts out with a prologue introducing us to Cornelius Vanderbilt and taking us through her family line on down to the birth of her father and eventually to her brother, Will, and finally herself. Once we get into the memoir itself, I start to lose interest. The Burden children are seven and eight and enroute to visit relatives when their plane meets some turbulence and we get our first glimpse of Wendy Burden's sense of her place in the family. "Being a girl meant squat in my father's family."Using this plane ride as an introduction, we jump to the grandparents, or Gran, or Popsie with small bits of the children's mother as well as her uncles on her father's side. The major disconnect for me starts with the description of the grandparent's German chauffeur, George, who is suspected of being a Nazi. This fascination with George's heritage is fueled by Uncle Ham's deep interest in all things regarding the Third Reich as well as Wendy Burden's "humor." "German people liked to cover their lamps with...the skin of Jews gassed at Auschwitz." I didn't find it "wickedly funny", "intriguing", "quirky" or any of the other adjectival words on the back.We move on to Christmas with Wendy Burden's paternal family. Uncle Ham is excited to receive a book on Hermann Goring while Wendy receives an Easy Bake oven which she calls a "crematorium." I'm sure, again, this is meant to be funny because she probably means putting dolls or other toys in the Easy Bake but, for me, here is where I give up.
    • 4/5
      Wendy Burden is a great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt and as would be expected, her family is rich. The kind of rich where you have butlers, maids, cooks, nannies, secretaries, gardeners and drivers to make sure you never need to lift a finger except to pick up another cocktail. As enviable as this may seem, it didn't make her life a bed of roses. Wendy's father committed suicide when she was six. Her mother was rarely at home, leaving Wendy and her two brothers with a nanny or their grandparents while she spent her time in sunny vacation spots drinking, sleeping around and working on her tan. Her grandparents were also self-involved drinkers and her grandfather openly favored her brothers over her. Substance abuse issues and eccentricity were normal in Wendy's family, and the children are largely left to fend for themselves.Despite all this, Dead End Gene Pool is not at all a "poor little rich girl" story. Burden never takes a "pity me" tone, and writes with humor and great affection for her family, who she discusses with brutal honesty, but also with understanding and compassion. This could have been a much darker book, but it manages to be a fun read and a fascinating look at a way of life that most of us would find almost incomprehensible.
    • 4/5
      Dead End Gene Pool, the memoir by Wendy Burden, the great-great granddaughter of the Vanderbilts, is a funny and yet surprisingly sad story of poor little rich kids. Neglected by the adults in their lives, Wendy and her brothers are ferried back and forth between their Mother, Grandparents and boarding schools, so much that it seems she and her brothers don't even know one another. Or want to for that matter. Wendy seemed to be the only child in her immediate family that came out of childhood intact. The prologue was a bit dry, more a family tree recitation than story, but the real fun started with chapter one and continued on throughout the book. Wendy seemed to get the short end of the stick for having the unfortunate gender of female. Maybe because she was a girl and her grandfather cared more about the males in the succession line, she was able to get away with more high-jinx. Because it’s her memoir, we see the world through her eyes, it would be interesting to see what one of her brothers thought of their childhood.The stories are told with great wit and what seems to be brutal honesty. I loved the details about all the different mansions and grounds, vacation spots and fancy cars. The day to day lives of the very rich are so interesting! The planning of meals and parties and picnic’s - it’s all hilarious and a little ridiculous, but so amazing to imagine. One had to feel sorry for the endless numbers of servants and secretaries that had to endure these insanely rich and egomaniacal people and their grandchildren who had the run of it all. My only question is how did Wendy go from being a goof ball who was fat, spotty and obsessed with death, to a seemingly normal person with a fantastic sense of humor? One would think with the way her mother treated her she’d have a pretty big chip on her shoulder. It was sad in the end that all the old people died, but that’s what happens to people, they get old and die. I only wish that Wendy told a few more stories about what happened to her and her brothers to get them to this point. I guess the sign of a good book is if it leaves you wanting more. I’d like more please.
    • 3/5
      When I was small (and angry at my parents) I would fantasize about my "real" parents. They were undoubtedly rich and royal. Well, Wendy Burden never needed to fantasize. Her family may not have been royal, but they were undoubtedly rich. You see, she is a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt and she grew up surrounded by rather obscene amounts of money, a child of privilege, apathy, and neglect. Dead End Gene Pool is her memoir of a childhood lived mainly in the company of servants and in the rarified air of the super rich. And having read this book, I am quite certain I'm glad that no royal, rich parents came to claim me from my perfectly happy suburban existence.Opening with a quick run through of her moneyed family tree, Burden starts with Vanderbilt and hops through the branches down to her own paternal grandparents. Once she settles on the family members she actually knew, she starts in on the crazy, sometimes funny, sometimes terrible life that made up her early life. Her father, suffering from depression, committed suicide when she was just six. Her alcoholic mother, written out of the will for her serial adultery, became a completely absent and neglectful parent. And Burden and her brothers ping-ponged between their mother's empty of supervision home and their wealthy grandparents' servant-filled homes. In neither place did they find the nurturing and love that children need.Burden chronicles not only the eccentricities of the very rich (when money is no object you can order cars from Europe to be delivered to you that same day or find game that is in season somewhere in the world in order to have it for dinner the following evening or pad your entire bathroom in foam so that when you stumble and fall in your alcoholic and aged haze, you won't bruise yourself), she also lays bare the odd child that she was, obsessed with the Addams family, collecting dead animals to watch the various stages of decomposition, begging for a pony and then creating elaborate and murderous fantasies about Will's demise when it was gifted to her older brother instead of her. She writes about many of her family members as if they were fictional characters, mocking their faults (an overly flatulent grandmother and a misogynistic grandfather), exposing their immorality (Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham's Nazi fetish), and generally skewering all and sundry. In one instance she appears to think that her uncle's obsession with tracts warning against the evils of inherited wealth, which he distributed to the whole family, is laughable but really, it seems that while he may have been a buffoon, at least as Burden represents the family, his tracts weren't off base.While there were funny anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book, this was ultimately a sad story. The absenteeism, the drug use and abuse, the mental illness, acknowledged or not, and the general lack of love and attention displayed here make it hard to call this a funny book or even one rife with dark humor. I was left with the feeling that the people in Burden's family were unpleasant and distasteful and I wouldn't have wanted to know them myself. She does have a neat turn of phrase here and there and some amount of self-awareness comes through but the narrative itself is often choppy and repetitive. This brief visit into the skeletal closets of the highest of society makes me grateful that I don't live there and it was with an unseemly sense of relief that I closed the book at the last. Although I didn't love the book myself, it is a fascinating peep into a world in which very few people live and those who enjoy the lifestyles of the rich and famous and want to know more about the grit under the facade of the houses and the cars and the possessions will undoubtedly enjoy this book for its insight into the troubled highest echelons of WASP society.
    • 4/5
      Wendy Burden is the great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt on her fathers side. She has written a memoir of her growing-up years being shuttled between her unfathomably wealthy grandparents, and her jet-setting mother, widowed young, who barely allows the dirt to settle before she whisks off with a drink in her hand to pursue the perfect tan. I am not normally a fan of "poor little rich girl" stories, but this was hilarious. Yes, it is hard to feel sorry for someon who never wanted for anything (except a pony), but Burden tells the story in such an easy, detached way that all I could do was chuckle. The opening chapter, which includes the "genealogy," was confusing to me (maybe a family tree or a chart would have helped), but it's possible that I wasn't paying close enough attention because the stories and asides were so engaging. My only regret was that there was no explanation of the picture on the front of the book.
    • 3/5
      Author Burden takes what is in reality a sad family situation full of neglect and lacking any sort of parental direction, and spins it into a funny tale reminiscent of Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris. The cover of this book is definitely what reeled me in, and Burden hits the ground running with jokes about her flatulent grandmother and her jet-setting absentee mother.Although the book definitely has its witty moments, the jokes and the incessant effort to make a bad situation funny become tiresome after awhile. I also wonder at the accuracy of certain parts of the memoir. Nobody I know remembers this much about their childhood! I think I was hoping for more of the Vanderbilt family backstory, not just how messed up Burden's parents and grandparents were. Certain stories in the memoir that were supposed to make me chuckle simply made me cringe or shake my head. Needless to say, this one fell flat for me. If you want a truly funny memoir, check out Burroughs instead.
    • 4/5
      Funny satiric book ala David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. Snippets of her dysfunctional childhood and her whacko family. Actually, she was quite a whacko too, though not to the degree of the rest. It was sad how she was obviously crying out for help by her bad behavior, but ignored. Ignored too, when she should have been protected from lecherous people in her life.
    • 4/5
      If one was wondering what it's like to grow up in one of the United States's wealthiest families, Burden's memoir provides the answer. Descended from Cornelius Vanderbilt, Burden grew up among the super rich. If her autobiography makes anything clear, it's that the super rich are entirely dysfunctional. Burden grew up with little familial attention: her father committed suicide, her mother was rarely present. Burden spent most of her time in boarding school or with her distant grandparents, who clearly preferred her brothers. It's nearly impossible to overstate just how dysfunctional "Burdenland" is. Burden does a brilliant job highlighting the absurdity of uber wealth. For anyone who suspects that nobody actually needs that much money, this book will certainly reinforce that. This is a thoughtful memoir, Burden manages to highlight the absurdities of her family without any of the bitterness to which she is likely entitled. The Gilded Age that produced Cornelius Vanderbilt was alive and well in the twentieth century, at least for some. This memoir is both hilarious and poignant, and well worth the read.