Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir
By Wendy Burden, hardcover, 180 pages, Gotham
The Vanderbilt dynasty may not strike you as the stuff of great comedy, but Wendy Burden, a four-times-great-granddaughter of old Cornelius, captures the extravagant decline of her wealthy family with the bite of a standup comic, reminding you that your life and material are what you make of them. After her father's suicide when she was six, Burden and her brothers, were repeatedly shipped off by their self-absorbed, tan-and-man-obsessed mother to join their eccentric, alcohol-soaked paternal grandparents in their lavish New York, Maine and Florida homes.
Despite weekends and holidays spent catered to by a battalion of servants in "Burdenland," the author was made to feel decidedly second class as the only girl, and clearly would have traded it all for a loving maternal hug. She was obsessed with ghoulish Wednesday Addams, and regaled her grandparents' dinner guests with her plans to become a mortician, "with an emphasis on restorative art." Discussing her great-grandmother, who lost her husband early to leukemia, Burden writes with typical wry humor: "With the help of a butler, a footman, a French chauffeur named Lucien, a cook, several maids, and a governess, Gran had raised her two sons on her own."
