Customer Reviews

Savage Grace

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

 

 

To be fair about it, I should say that I have not read a lot of true stories of bloodshed and sleaze and incest among the very-very rich, but this is the best that I have ever read. It is very well-written and superbly researched, and paints as full a picture of the glamorous and twisted life of the Baekeland family as one could possibly have hoped for. Grandpa invented the first really useful plastic, and his heirs proceeded to slide into a life of riches, luxury, and moral decay. I liked this book so much that I made a point of visiting the town in Catalunya where much of it takes place. This is truly a poignant and powerful narrative, one that deserves to be reprinted for many years to come.

I bought the book after having seen the movie and been intrigued by the story. However, the book is very disappointing. I have not been able to get through it, due to the sturcture and writing of the book. To begin with, there is hardly any narrative. All the authors have done is to display interviews of various people intersperced with police and court reports. The reader must look up each interviewee's name in the index; however, many of them are not in the index in back of the book, which leads the reader to the question: "who is this person anyway"?

What could have been a very compelling book becomes more of an outline or a report. The authors either were too lazy or too unskilled as writers to make a narrative out of this very multi-layered story, which really is a disservice to the telling of this tale.

The subject material was realy good; but there was no continuity (chronilogically) which made this a very difficult book to read

After seeing this movie on cable, I wanted to read the book on which it was based. The book, Savage Grace, arrived in a timely manner and was in good condition. It was exactly as I had expected. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in abnormal psychology leading to murder. It explores the bizaar, tangled relationships in one wealthy, disfunctional family and the tragic results.

This is a True story of tempestuous, incestuous Crime. Back in 1907, Belgian emigrant Leo Hendrik Baekeland created an early plastic he named Bakelite, the make-almost-anything proto-plastic which still brings joy to the hearts of Martha Stewart's flock and Diasporate Ebayers everywhere.

Bakelite made Baekeland very, very rich - such that his heirs were very, very idly rich. In 1972, one of the Bakelite babies' babies' baby murdered his mummy (a mere Baekeland by marriage.)

Authors Robins and Aronson stay in the background here, letting the principals, via correspondence and interviews, speak for themselves. Their torrid tale melds back and forth chronologically, and hither and yon geographically with the globetrotting High Society set, with an ironic only-in-true-life end: Death by Plastic. Sumptuous Decadence!
Reviewed by TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer