Customer Reviews

The Nutcracker

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

 

 

Oh boy. Just how much intense, stupid madness can one family harbor? The story reads like a parody of human behavior. Alexander's narrative, chuck full of detail and precise diction and some wonderful turns of phrase, often spirals into something like a long-running slapstick comedy too bizarre for television. The horror of neglect and greed, hatred, prejudice and violence are all here, but the form they take in this tale is so absurd sometimes that you have to laugh aloud at the sick antics.

The three most important characters are: Franklin Bradshaw, the miserly patriarch, apparently murdered by his grandsons at the insistence of his youngest daughter, Frances, an incredibly depraved creature nobody could have invented, and Berenice, mother of Frances and husband of Franklin, a slavish practitioner of "smotherly love." They hail from Utah where Franklin is a non-practicing Mormon. He has spent a lifetime of working sixteen hours a day and has, through his auto parts business and oil and land leases, amassed a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions of (1981) dollars. Frances and everybody else in the family would like to get their hands on the money, and each of them is deathly afraid that the others are scheming to cheat them out of their fair share, and they are. But Frances, the youngest of the four Bradshaw children, is particularly evil. She is the pretty baby of the family that no one could ever say no to, who always got away with everything as a child and expects that to continue. When the world says, "Whoa, child, no!" she fights back with every scheme and wile she can muster, committing nearly any and all crimes imaginable. She usually gets away with them because she has a quality about her that prevents anyone from saying no to her, at least anyone in her family. She is perhaps as neglectful a mother as one can imagine, physically beating and mentally torturing her children, using them as pawns in her wars with her two ex-husbands and her parents and sisters. She is an alcoholic, a drug addict, a paranoid schizophrenic, a bigot, a class-conscious low life, who hates blacks, Jews and poor white trash; a woman who is as trashy as one can get, yet a woman who manages to manipulate her mother and father and others so that she always has time to drink and whore around and send her children to private schools (even as she pushes them out the door in the morning in their underwear without breakfast or bath).

But enough. It's a good read, and I have to admire Alexander's writing ability. She makes it all very vivid and she does it with style and grace and without taking up some phony political position or presenting some shallow psychology. She sparkles the narrative with insight and bon mots and never slows down or bores.

Shana Alexander, a great woman writer, author of "Very Much a Lady" the story of Jean Haris, helps you understand one of the most fascinating and horryfing criminal cases and trials of the century. That of a manipualtive mother with a sick, greed-filled mind willing to sacrifice her own son in order to lay her hands on her father's fortune, he being one of the richest men in Utah. But luck wasn't available for the cold-blooded Manhattan socialite, and she is put to jail. An excellent book of investigation of one of the most bizarre cases of greed in America's history

If you want to read an excellent, detailed and well written his tory of the Bradshaw family do not read this book. Instead read Jonathan Coleman's "At Mother's Request". This book needs alot of editing. The story is better told in chronological order, not by jumping around in time. The story of the murder of Franklin Bradshaw by his daughter, with his grandson acting as the "hit man" is a fascinating one. I just don't think that Ms. Alexander is a particularly capable writer. This book is both disorganized and overly speculative. Still, the story has no equal in its ability to hold your attention.

It is unsurprising, perhaps, that so gripping a story as the killing of Franklin Bradshaw attracted the attention of more than one author.

What is surprising (to me) is that Shana Alexander's book has received so much more attention over the years than Jonathan Coleman's simultaneously-published account of the same facts. Coleman wrote AT MOTHER'S REQUEST (1985). I found it by far the more informative and gripping of the two accounts.

The authors relied on different sources. Alexander seems to have been very diligent in exhaustively interviewing members of this extremely dysfunctional family. But Coleman had better access to law enforcement sources, and so tells the story as a police, and prosecutorial, man (and woman) hunt.

The different sources and perspectives have many consequences.. For example, Alexander mentions at one point that Marc Schroeder's defense attorneys introduced into court a tape of his mother berating his sister (who was 6 years old and a budding ballerina, the inspiration for Alexander's title). Frances shrieks at the young girl in the most horrible way for her inability to spit out the complete definition of a sentence. "A sentence begins with a capital letter, expresses a complete thought, and ends with a period, exclamation point, or question mark," -- quite a mouthful to memorise at six!

As I say, Alexander mentions this tape, but we have to take her word for it that it shows Frances doing that. Coleman actually reproduces a substantial portion of the transcript of the tape for us, so we draw our own conclusion about Mom's abusiveness.

Both authors seem to have invented false names to protect the budding ballerina. Alexander calls her "Aradne" as I think I remember. Coleman calls her "Lavinia." If ever there was a good case for changing the name to protect the innocent, this is it! Still, we can draw the conclusion that she must have some multi-syllabic and classical//mythical name. She must be an adult by now of,course (2000). I wonder whether she grew up all right after all this and whether she had an adult ballet careeer and even what she is doing now.

Alexander wrote a decent book. But if you're only going to read one, read Coleman's.

Shana Alexander published her take on the by now notorious Francis Schreuder case in l985. In the same month of that year, Jonathan Coleman published his big, non-fiction study, "At Mother's Request," of the same shocking crime. Of the two, Coleman's book far surpasses Alexander's on several levels. Coleman appears to have interviewed and investigated every major and minor figure involved in this case where a psychopathic mother orders her son to kill her wealthy, plain-living father. More importantly, he includes lots of dramatic photographs of the murderous Mom, her two psychotic sons and the major players in this bigger-than-life tragedy. Alexander doesn't include a single photograph. She and a few other true crime writers appear to have this lofty idea that pictures should be included in lurid, paperback true-crime stories only because books like her's are too big and important to cater to the plebians. I keep harping on this lack of pictures because I think it greatly dilutes a major source of information and enjoyment for readers. Your imagination can only fill in the blanks so far. I dearly love to curl up with a big, thick nonfiction crime book and Coleman's is the one you'll find me with on a wintry weekend. Alexander's book is okay but unsatisfying. Yet, it was her book that became the source of a wildly popular TV miniseries back in the 80s.

That is the only reason that I gave this book 4 stars rather than a deserved 5 stars. I remember watching the six hour mini-series starring the late Lee Remick and Inga Swenson as Frances Schrueder and her sister Marilyn. It left an impression on me that I had to read this book. When Shana Alexander just died, I just bought it and it's riveting and fascinating into the mind of Frances Schrueder who manipulated and controlled her children. The writing is excellent in the book but it lacks pictures of the people very much involved in this sad tragedy. If only Frances received the help she desperately needed in college, maybe the circumstances would have been very different. I don't think she is a manic depressive but very narcissitic like Betty Broderick in California. Frances is a complicated, mysterious woman who often never gains friendship or true love in her life. Her mother does everything for her but yet Frances is unrelentingly possessive, greedy, and money-hungry or just obsessive about it to get her own sons to play a part in gaining her undeserving inheritance.

I read this book way back in the mid 85's when it was still in the news.

It's a fascinating tale of greed, madness and murder, in which a New York socialite has her son murder her wealthy father. The plot is too convoluted to begin to review it, so I'll just say it's an incredible read. The characters are unbelievable, and Shana Alexander was an expert when it came to making it real.

I would love to have seen photographs that is usual in true crime stories especially involving a New York City socialite who uses her own son to kill her father so she can inherit her wealth. I remember seeing the television film with Lee Remick who was awesome as Frances, the troubled divorcee obsessed with climbing the ladder even if it meant hurting her family to get the attention at the top. She wanted to part of that elite New York City social sect and she was part of the Lincoln Center Ballet as a trustee. They didn't know what she was in for. Frances was the child of a Mormon father who was very frugal with his children, his daughters especially Frances who felt that she earned his wealth by being his daughter. She had no regards for anybody else but herself and Shana Alexander writes about all of it in this powerful book but you want to see pictures of the victim, the family, the relatives, and the players.