Dead End Gene Pool : A Memoir (Paperback)

from CDianeK

Families are weird. The rich are different. Rich families? Watch out. Wendy Burden is a great - great - great granddaughter of the Commodore, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Despite the several generation gap between his time and hers, some things stay the same. The extraordinarily wealthy live in a fuzzy ...

from tloeffler

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 sh...

from kraaivrouw

This belongs firmly to that family of memoirs where the story is driven by the weird people in the writer's immediate family. Everyone wanders around sort of goggle-eyed and mad, as if they were permanently trapped in a Wes Anderson movie. Auguten Burroughs famously does this in Running with Scis...

from madhatter22

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 c...

from readingwithtea

"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 qu...