A father with an FBI file who also worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during World War II; a mother from the wealthy Warburg family; a paternal grandmother who quit working at the infamous Triangle Waist Factory just before 146 women perished in a fire of historic proportions on March 25, 1911; a maternal grandmother who was George Gershwin's lover and the first to compose a score for a Broadway play: That's just for starters in the cast of characters who people Katharine Weber's remarkable memoir.
Other wonderful personages appear, including controversial psychiatrist Gregory Zilboorg and journalist Harold Weisberg, dean of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists. But Weber, an accomplished novelist, does not merely drop names and string together anecdotes. She fascinates with an account of herself as a child with an unpredictable and unreliable father, who promised her the world but never lived up to her -- or his own -- high expectations, and a mother who never could seem to make her own desires understood.
Read this intriguing memoir to discover how Katharine Weber, who loved to snoop in her family's collection of memorabilia, got to know about and to know these great and not-so-great figures that compose her life.
