Sobre El Autor
Tom Sancton was a longtime Paris bureau chief for Time magazine where he wrote more than fifty cover stories. He first broke the Bettencourt Affair for many American readers with his feature piece in Vanity Fair in 2010. A Rhodes scholar who studied at Harvard and Oxford, he splits his time between mostrar más Paris and New Orleans, where he is a research professor at Tulane University. In 2014, the French government named Tom Sancton a Chevalier (Knight) in the Order of Arts and letters. mostrar menos
Obras de Tom Sancton
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The Bettencourt Affair: The World's Richest Woman… por Tom Sancton
This book started out as a magazine article, and probably should have stayed that way.
Wow, what a mess. The story of the Bettencourt Affair is a tangled web. A wealthy woman is taken advantage of by her staff, by her companion, and by her own daughter. Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress to the L'Oreal cosmetic fortune, was fantastically wealthy. As she descended into the depths of Alzheimer's disease, that wealth and the management of it would come to the forefront of French political and judicial life.
The book presents the facts surrounding the case in a very readable way. Who's the bigger villain, the daughter or the photographer companion? It's tough to say. Both are obviously greedy. I had no idea about this story until I read the book. Its description, as well as the views of wealth in French society, were fascinating to me.
A good read.… (más)
The book presents the facts surrounding the case in a very readable way. Who's the bigger villain, the daughter or the photographer companion? It's tough to say. Both are obviously greedy. I had no idea about this story until I read the book. Its description, as well as the views of wealth in French society, were fascinating to me.
A good read.… (más)
Perhaps less well-known today than the kidnapping of one of the Getty heirs by a group of Italian mobsters, the snatching of Franco-Belgian industrialist Baron Édouard-Jean Empain from a Paris street grabbed just as many headlines in the 1970s. Tom Sancton's book covers the kidnapping itself—which included the rather gruesome amputation of one of Empain's fingers as a proof of life—as well as both how the Empain family amassed its fortune in the first place (brutal and bloody colonial exploitation in the Congo; probable collaboration with the Nazis) and how that fortune dissipated in the aftermath of the kidnapping. Empain's reputation as a businessman took a hit from which it never recovered, and let's just say that his family didn't welcome him back with the kind of warmth you might expect. This is a briskly readable mash-up of a work of true-crime with a multi-generational examination of wealth and dysfunction, but for me Sancton didn't quite manage to articulate the significance of why this series of events was worthy of chronicling in a book. (To be clear, I think there are framings that could do that, but Sancton doesn't construct them here.)… (más)
Liliane is one of the world's richest women. As she ages, she begins giving lavish gifts to Banier, a friend. Her daughter Liliane is furious, believing that Banier is taking advantage of her mother.
Although I was interested in this story, the book itself was very boring. It was just a recitation of fact after fact. It was very dry. Overall, a bust.
Although I was interested in this story, the book itself was very boring. It was just a recitation of fact after fact. It was very dry. Overall, a bust.
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 5
- Miembros
- 244
- Popularidad
- #93,239
- Valoración
- 3.4
- Reseñas
- 5
- ISBNs
- 16