The Last Mrs. Astor A New York Story [Paperback]

Kiernan&brings out the fascinating paradoxes of Brooke Astors courageous, fiercely inventive career as a wife and a widow.Kiernan resurrects the monument as she appeared when the author first met her, over lunch at the Carlyle in 1999: neither polished to a blinding luster nor especially tarnished, but imposing and original just the same.This sympathetic telling of [Brooke Astors] story should counterbalance all that gossipy sensationalism.A gently revealing biography that does an especially good job of portraying Mrs. Astor before she was, well, Mrs. Astor.Restor[es] Mrs. Astor to her throne.An intimate and affectionate portrait of a woman who reinvented herself at age 56.A concise and engaging look at the tiny doyenne of society&Ms. Kiernans book is most valuable as a catalog of all the things that Mrs. Astor did for us. Kiernan's sharp-eyed biography brings back a woman who, far into her 90s, relished the dance of life.