Customer Reviews

The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First my biases: I'm a Canadian by birth who once lived just a couple of miles from the Bronfman house in Regina. I now live in the NYC suburbs and stood marvelling at the Seagram bldg on Park Ave only 2 weeks ago. In the interim, I've been a consumer market researcher and Seagram has been a client off and on for more than 10 years. I'm also more than a bit interested in booze.

Given the above, I find this book tremendously interesting with literally hundreds of details that were absolutely new to me... and I probably know more about the Bronfman family & Seagram than the average bear. If you're at all interested in the Bronfmans, Seagram or booze, you'll find this to be a fascinating read.

But there are a lot of stylistic problems here as well. First, as other reviewers noted above, Faith's constant references to other authors / biographers is almost annoying. It's like he's personal friends with the other writers for goodness sake.

Second, for some reason, Faith treats the Richler book (Solomon Gursky Was Here) as a more important reference source than personal interviews, biographies or other non-fiction sources. I read the Richler book and loved it but not sure why Faith needs to keep coming back to it?

Third, the editing in this book is simply a mess - there's just no other word for it. Usually I don't even think about editing but with this book, it was so bad I almost stopped reading after the first 50 pages. In the first 4-5 chapters, Faith not only makes the same point multiple times but sometimes uses the same sentence! It was like deja-vu all over again. It's this last point that is most confusing to me - Faith is a former senior editor of The Economist so if anyone should get the editing right, its him.

Anyway, I'll still give it 4 stars. Its a great story and filled in a lot of blanks for me.

The true lasting historical legacy of the Bronfmans Family lies not only with their spectacular business senses, but in the trust that Mr Sam gave his daughter Phyllis Lambert to build The Seagram Building in New York in 1958. It is this modernist monument and Lambert other lasting pyramids, The Saidye Bronfman Center and The Canadian Center of Architecture in Montreal that will remain the potent cultural contributions to world culture by the Bromfman's dynasty.

Nicholas Faith book is a complex narrative and interesting multi-generational family history of Russian Jewish immigrants whose industrious businessmen shaped capitalism in the western world of the 20th Century. At day's end, it does not matter if all the sources are totally true or partially embellished, for this read is a very entertaining one !

The detailed anecdotes of the Bronfman's Clan through the last hundred years sustained this reader's interest and pike through the last page. The chronological story develops like a recorded series of individual anecdotes and honestly quotes from previously published materials peppered with interesting bits of the Canadian / American booze and trade history mixed with technical specifications on the art of distilling and blending whiskey, scotches, gins, bourbons and everything else of drinkable quality in between !

The energetic and driven personality of "Sam" (Samuel Bronfman, 1889-1971) looms larger than life in Faith' tales. He preside with his iron will over an extended family to build and continuously expand a business empire with his unique intelligence. He skillfully and patiently manipulates a coterie of Canadian officials -and everybody else!- who seems rather happy to cooperates. With his historical business achievements, "Mr.Sam" was a genius at sizing the strength of his competitors and very skilled at exploiting their weaknesses.

In time, his son and grandson (Edgar and Edgar Jr.) each take the helm of the Seagram Empire and develops the business more or less successfully, depending on whether one wants to merely account for added dollars figures as a true measure of success, or fairly analyze their boldness in taking the enormous risks involved in transforming the core assets of a worldwide business group into the realities of the 21st Century economic landscape... Reading Good Spirits by Edgar M. Bronfman gives a valuable insider point of view on the story.

A graphic genealogy tree of the Bronfman's extended family would have been a nice added visual feature in order to sort out everybody.

Enjoy this joyous sleigh ride !

Unbelieveably badly written. How can you make this family boring? Also, seemed to "borrow" from a lot of other authors. Don't waste your time.

I agree with the previous reviewers that Faith brings in too many quotes from other authors. This is strange, because he has really done a lot of "homework" so that he could make the material his own. I was slowed down by his long awkward sentences and unending attributions. I guess it's better to acknowledge your sources rather than plagiarizing, but the book reads like a long term paper.
Some of his conclusions are just thrown out there, such as this one about Sam's two daughters: "The girls were not even given Hebrew lessons--which makes one wonder if Mr. Sam secretly hoped that they would 'marry out.'" My experience as a young Jewish girl growing up in mid-century America was that it wasn't de rigeur for girls to attend Hebrew School; the boys went because they were preparing for an eventual bar mitzvah. The author previously discussed Mr. Sam's lack of religiosity (he held business meetings on Saturday and had only a nominally kosher kitchen at home). His son Edgar ignored Jewish ritual for a large part of his life, and "married out" several times. So much for the value of Hebrew School!
An example of the multitude of sentences needing the touch of an editor is this one: "In 1971 his mother, Ann--who remained a staunch supporter--had left his father when he was in his teens after a period in which his father had paid little or no attention to his family."
Despite my desire to turn the pages a lot faster, I kept with the book and learned a lot about Canadian Jews, bootleggers, Scotch, anti-Semitism, and more. I wish that I had read this before I read "Solomon Gursky Was Here," since that roman a clef would have had a lot more associations for me.

This isn't a bad book but Nicholas Faith has a problem acknowledging the gangster beginning of the Bronfman fortune. Pure and simple Sam B et all were thugs and likely murders. Mr. Faith goes to grea great endless endless lengths to explaine how anti-semnitism shaped the Bronfman's. Huh. It never seems to occur to him that the alleged anti- Jewish sentiment could have been whipped up precisely because the Bronfmans made such a big deal of their religion/heritage solely to cover up their ways. That most of the people they dealth with and enriched were also Jewish thugs doesn't help. Mr. Faith's inability to deal with this fact almost ruins the book.

Luckily however he is honest enough to move the story along and present many of the dirty facts even if he does always try to gloss over them There is also a little too much info on whiskey blends. A more detaled analysis of the ethnic root of prohibition and a clearler focus on the political bribery that grew the Bronfman fortune might put some of their alleged present day charitable acts in a clearer focus. Since Edgar is big on reparations how about reparations for the lives ruined by thier crooked empire? You might want to read this book but keep one eye over your shoulder wide ope for the whole truth.