Customer Reviews

Life at Winterthur: A du Pont Family Album

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Magnificent and engrossing. Maggie Lidz's book draws on a stunning array of fresh material to create a three-dimensional portrait of one of our most significant and influential families. Every page is fascinating reading. This is a patient, masterful study that at long last sets the record straight - "All gimmicks gone." Life at Winterthur signals a major advance in our thinking about the Du Ponts and the special place they occupy in the previous two centuries.

A wonderful insight to the lives of the Du Ponts revealed in an easy to read format

Kudo to Maggie Lidz

I just got my copy and am already seduced by the rich collection of photographs of my favorite Dupont family. Maggie Lidz obviously knows her Dupont family history and is amazing me with details that I had never read before anywhere else. I can't wait to read the rest. This book has definately made me want to go back to visit the Winterthur chateau with a whole new perspective. The whole family and place really comes to life with this book.

Life at Winterthur is a compound of anecdote, symphony and nightmare. Its mechanics resemble those of a dream that has freed the author from the necessities of common logic and has enabled her to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and economic development, into a circular design, of which every part is beginning, middle and end.

Now that we know, through Maggie Lidz's copious family album, the complex use to which the Duponts put their experiences, possessions and obsessions, the value of being in close touch with their immediate world becomes not merely tangential, as it once seemed, but central to an understanding of them.

Always interesting, piquant and unrelentingly rational as she puts the Duponts through brilliant hoops of love and self-discovery, Maggie Lidz proves herself an uncompromising but humane adept in the paradoxes of passion. Beneath the high comedy and the grotesquerie of her story, she is examining the profound questions with which human beings are, from time to time, brought face to face.

circumspect, contrived and irrelevant, this book is a waste of time. significant contributions to our country and culture by various DuPonts are not contained in a substantial or edifying way. even the similarity of the first reviews herein are suspiciously reviews by one person. wouldn't surprise me at all.