We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante (Excelsior Editions) [Hardcover]

Eve Pell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2009 | Series: Excelsior Editions

An inside story of privilege, inherited wealth, and the bizarre values and customs of the American upper crust.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this self-indulgent memoir, journalist Pell recollects her privileged East Coast upbringing and her gradual break with the affluence and expectations of her dynastic clan. As a young woman, Pell rode horses, spent time at her grandparents' Tuxedo Park villa ("with two enormous round towers and a long, splendid living room that you stepped down into from a double stairway") and shopped at Bergdorfs with relatives called Cooky, Pookie, Goody and Tinkie (Pell was nicknamed Topsy). Following her debut, Pell went to college "to be interesting to my future husband and to pass the time until he showed up," and it wasn't until she graduated and moved to the West Coast that she escaped the overweening pressure to fill the family-standard "snobbish foxhunting debutante" mold. Her eventual transformation to black sheep, unfortunately, is too little too late. Though her luxurious childhood is marked by genuine emotional pain, alienation and confusion, most readers will have a hard time empathizing with her personal issues or her upper-class guilt, particularly in the present financial climate.
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Review

"In We Used to Own the Bronx, her revealing and riveting memoir, Eve Pell defies the dictates of her social class--to be charming but not to say what she felt--and bares all. She detonates bombshells and unmasks betrayals on almost every page." --San Francisco Chronicle

"... a literary treat. ... Pell gives us a kind of cultural anthropology of the closest thing in America to a landed gentry." --Wall Street Journal Review by Sol Stern

"We all know what poverty can do--to individuals, to families, to societies that look the other way ... But what about wealth? What can the possession of immense fortune, over time, do to us? Eve Pell knows. Eve Pell, in this riveting new memoir, tells. We should listen." --Too Much

"...refreshingly direct ... Pell ... uses her lively memoir of growing up in aristocratic style to ask a series of provocative questions: Is it possible to choke on a silver spoon? What good is a sense of entitlement? Are riches wasted on the rich? Her candid account of bristling at her birthright transcends the stereotype suggested by the subtitle to divulge the psychic pressures of living with inherited privilege in a meritocracy-mad country ... To her lasting credit, We Used to Own the Bronx is a graceful object lesson in how perspective is gained not all at once but by accretion, the reward of years of methodical observation." --truthdig.com

"Eve Pell gives us a fascinating glimpse into a secret world of unfathomable wealth and privilege. Hers is an unexpected and ultimately hopeful journey of rebellion and reconciliation." --Jane Fonda --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 225 pages
• Publisher: Excelsior Editions/State University of New Yo; First Edition edition (March 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1438424973
• ISBN-13: 978-1438424972
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #831,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Candide as Perp, May 6, 2009

By 

T. Berner (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante (Excelsior Editions) (Hardcover)

Ms. Pell begins the first chapter of her book by observing: "I come from a family in love with itself." That sums up what's wrong with the book, the author and the family.

Actually, I know something about the family myself, since some of my ancestors were Pells. I tell people that the fortune zigged and my branch of the family zagged, but in truth, they swam in that pond until my great-grandmother married an Irish Catholic (a worse sin than marrying a Jew) and was disowned by the family. That my great-grandfather converted to Anglicanism didn't change anything.

If anything, Ms. Pell underemphasizes the family's egoism. The family used to house its archives in a townhouse in midtown Manhattan. They published a quarterly magazine about themselves. They published books about the family, such as one called something like "War Heroes of the Pell Family," listing page after page of able bodied men who avoided combat by snagging billets at supply depots and training commands.

The author's rare note of moderation is all the more unusual since the highs (and presumably the lows - they are, or were until this book came along, more private) are largely exaggerated. You can start with the title. The Pells never "owned The Bronx," the Morris family, older and far more accomplished than the Pells, owned most of it. The Pells owned a narrow, 9000 acre strip along the east coast of what is now The Bronx and Westchester County.

The truth of the matter is that the family has been in decline for 300 years, staying afloat by strategic, gold digging marriages with robber barons they had only distaste for. This seems to have had the effect of breeding all of the love and human emotion out of their family relationships.

To the younger members of such families, the Sixties must have seemed like a breath of fresh air. An enormous percentage of the leadership of the counterculture were people like Ms. Pell. It was a way of bringing down mummy and daddy while also feeling superior to the great unwashed with whom they associated in the Movement. And if things got out of hand, there was always daddy to send you lawyers, guns and money.

In truth, it was the family names that mattered to their fellow revolutionaries - just as it was the family name at the charity luncheons that mattered - but in the process, the Silver Spoon Radicals substituted an excessive love of their geneology with an excessive love of themselves.

This comes out most clearly in Ms. Pell's account of her days as a radical in San Francisco. She claims to have had qualms as the Black Panthers she supported killed fellow prisoners and guards, but she doesn't give a moment's thought to the victims' widows and orphans and grieving families. That changes when an upper class colleague of hers is crippled in an assassination attempt because of perceived disloyalty to the Black Panther cause. Then her eyes are opened - "I could be hurt!" - and she calls the police whom she previously considered "pigs." I would really have a lot more admiration for her character if she had behaved like the revolutionaries of Stalin's purges and prepared herself to die for her beliefs, even at the hands of her fellow conspirators. All we see here is that same Pell arrogance singling itself out as special.

The book itself reads like a long monologue with the author's psychiatrist, so much so that the reader wants to send her a bill for professional services rendered. She devotes an entire page to a single incident where her mother chastises a maid for shattering a family heirloom. Okay, okay, you want to shout, your mother had the grace of a fish wife. Get on with it.

And she seems only dimly aware that her father's coldness and distance may have had something to do with the fact that he had been cuckolded and abandoned by her mother only a few years into their marriage. He never ceased to love his wife and his whole life seems to have been ruined by her infidelity. There is a moving story there, but the author lacks the empathy to tell it.

None of this, by the way, is a WASP thing. It is an Old Money thing, especially Old Money which has become impotent. You can see the same thing in virtually every ethnic group from Indian maharajahs to Russian nobility. It must be a false gods/golden idols phenomenon. Just as greyhounds lose their character when they catch the mechanical rabbit at a race, so does being born into privilege strip one of something fundamental. They are rare individuals who inherit a fortune and use it to do something worthwhile.

Still, it is hard to dislike Ms. Pell. One tends to side with her mother's Irish maid, who, when she would see Ms. Pell would mutter "poor, poor thing." Ms. Pell started life's race miles behind normal people who have learned that the secret to life in America is flexibility, enterprise and a good heart, qualities her parents' prestige and money worked against. She had a lot of catching up to do, and if she made some wrong turns along the way, it was because her mediocre education and lack of family values made her grossly unprepared for modern life.

The best part of the book is her reconciliation with her mother and the support her sons show her (although true to form, we learn almost nothing about her boys: where did they go to school? what is significant in their lives? where is Ms. Pell's motherly pride?).

She portrays herself as a sort of Candide, which is a refreshing change from Cinderella, but I don't buy it quite. It's all about that ego. Maybe she can work on that as her next project.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Radicalizing Eve Pell, March 8, 2009

By 

Dick McCurdie (Friday Harbor, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante (Excelsior Editions) (Hardcover)

We used to be neighbors, but I've only met Eve Pell a few times. After reading her `We Used to Own the Bronx' I feel that I've know her for ever. Her story is illuminating exposé of one of the most prominent early families in the country: wealthy as Croesus, but with all that privilege there was an unhealthy dose of tension. Eve takes us on her compelling journey from a life of servants and horses to elite schools to life as a socialite to radical activist and award winning journalist. Along the way, she found time to become a first-rate, long-distance runner. We get `skinny' on the Edwardian era leisure class with its obscure rules and prejudices that tend to insulate them from the real World but which can backfire causing angst, divorce, alcoholism and suicide. Couldn't put it down...

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Myth to Reality:One Woman's Fascinating Journey, March 9, 2009

By 

Alice Gorman (Maine) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante (Excelsior Editions) (Hardcover)

It is said that if you want the emotional truth of an era, read a novel, not a history book. In this day and time, a great memoir is a combination the two. In Eve Pell's "We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante," there is deep emotional truth that shatters the myths of the frivolous fifties, as well as the radical idealism of the sixties. An award-winning journalist, Pell is an intelligent, insightful, and courageous woman who fought hard for reality in the world around her and in her personal life. We, as readers, are lucky she was willing to share her journey.