Janny Scott is the author ofA Singular Woman- The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother. She was a reporter forThe New York Timesfrom 1994 to 2009 and was a member of theTimesreporting team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Visit JannyScott.com to learn more.
Praise for The Beneficiary:
"Engrossing, lovely." — Jonathan Yardley, The Washington
Post
"[The Beneficiary] could be the plot of an Edith Wharton or Henry
James novel …[Janny Scott’s] prose, too, has that Gilded Age feel:
decadence, decay and drink waft gorgeously off the pages. Yet this
study of privilege is also timely. . ." — The Wall Street
Journal
"[THE BENEFEICIARY is] vivid and penetrating. . .A wise and
poignant memoir about all the things money can buy—and all the
things it can’t.” –Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"Fascinating." — People
"Flair is in the DNA. As attentive to outré details as to
psychological turmoil, Scott makes the most of the suspense built
into her story. Her father, having promised Scott in her 20s that
she would inherit his many diaries, made her hunt long and hard for
them after his death in 2005. The bequest was brilliant: A man in
unhappy thrall to a place lured his daughter further and further
in—and she escaped with priceless insight into its, and his, hidden
depths."—The Atlantic
"[A] fascinating and judicious book." –The New York Times Book
Review
"[A] poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its
inevitable tarnish and decay…like something out of Fitzgerald or
Waugh."—The New Yorker
"Once in a while you read a biography that is crafted to sound like
fiction. Janny Scott has pulled this off. And it is pitch perfect."
–The Florida Times Union
"Told without false modesty or overweening privilege, Scott’s story
is a well-paced narrative punctuated with lyrical prose. This is a
fascinating glimpse into a rarefied world."—Publishers Weekly
"Fascinating for the painful personal legacies it uncovers. At the
same time, it is also compelling for the parallels it draws between
an earlier age of inequality and our own and the questions it
raises about how contemporary stories of new-rich families 'will
play out, one hundred years hence.'"— Kirkus Review
"Compulsively readable . . . a rare combination of wit, empathy,
candor, and shrewd sleuthing, [The Beneficiary] is a
multigenerational story that encompasses the Gilded Age, great
wealth and two World Wars, suicide and secret affairs, hidden
diaries and the life-long impact of alcohol. The world of wealth
and privilege Scott recreates so vividly may be hard for the rest
of us to imagine, but everyone will recognize the flawed but
fascinating human beings at its heart. Not to be missed.” —Geoffrey
C. Ward, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning,
Pulitzer Prize–finalist A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of
Franklin Roosevelt, 1905–1928
"Janny Scott writes with powerful love and no-nonsense honesty in
equal parts. Her Philadelphia Main Line forebears come off as
admirable, hilarious, sometimes awful, and sometimes
heart-wrenching in their fates—immensely fun to read about and hard
to categorize. This elegant memoir offers a vertiginous look at
where our age of inequality might lead." —Ian Frazier, nationally
bestselling author of Family and Great Plains
"Janny Scott set out to write a book about her father and his and
her glamorous, eccentric, fabulously rich and spoiled forebears.
She did so magnificently, but her book is more than a family saga.
It is a detailed social history of a vanished era in our past, of a
place and time quite unlike our own." —David Nasaw, New York Times
bestselling author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and
Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy and Pulitzer Prize–finalist
Andrew Carnegie
"A remarkable book . . . Scott, who has an eye for the telling
detail, writes with wit and flair." —Frances FitzGerald, author of
National Book Critics Circle Award–winning, National Book
Award–finalist The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
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