Legacy - Hardcover

Ogden, Christopher

3.8

60 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316853631 ISBN 13: 9780316853637

Publisher: Little, Brown, 1999

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The father fled East Prussia to escape the 1880s pogroms and, as a penniless immigrant boy, hawked newspapers on the streets of Chicago. The son, who lives on Philadelphia's Main Line and on a palatial California estate, is a multibillionaire and America's most generous living philanthropist. Legacy is an epic saga of how Moses and Walter Annenberg built a vast publishing empire and one of the nation's greatest family fortunes. Seeping through the century, the story encompasses brutal circulation wars, bookie parlours and racetracks, a lethal presidential vendetta, the glory days of Hollywood and of television, diplomatic drawing rooms, White House intrigues, tangled romances, a tragic suicide, extravagant social climbing, the Royal Family, a fabled art collection and astonishing generosity. Unauthorised but written with unprecedented access to the Annenberg family and their private papers, Legacy is at once a moving story of a family's triumph, a rich cultural history and an irresistible reading experience.

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Review:

How elegantly Christopher Ogden has told the fascinating tale of the billionaire philanthropist Walter Annenberg's love for his father, Moses Annenberg, whose prison sentence brought shame and embarrassment to his family. What a great pleasure to read about the good rich, who understand the obligations of being rich. (Dominick Dunne)

If business interests you, or politics, or mass culture, or a good gossip about Hollywood and Washington, you will like this book... The same goes for Philidelphia, WASP versus Jew, big-city newspapering of searing family heartache. It's like a great novel (NEW YORK OBSERVER)

A meticulous and fascinating account... well-researched, well-written, excellent reporting... rigorous scrutiny... a riveting story of the lifetime legacy that Moe left Walter and what Walter made of it. (BALTIMORE SUN)

Gripping... robust narrative... a revealing warts and all portrait. (PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY)

Book Description:

*The epic true-life saga of how Moses and Walter Annenberg built a vast publishing empire, a colossal family fortune and their astonishing generosity with it.

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