Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir

by Wendy Burden

Book Overview

In the tradition of Sean Wilsey's Oh The Glory of It All and Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors , the great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt gives readers a grand tour of the world of wealth and WASPish peculiarity, in her irreverent and darkly humorous memoir. For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius "The Commodore" Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592405266
• ISBN13: 9781592405268
• Release Date: April 2010
• Publisher: Gotham Books
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Fun, interesting read

An enjoyable glimpse into a world not known by many. Funny, sad, head-scratch inducing, all at the same time.

A very fun read

I loved this book -- Wendy Burden's incisive, witty story-telling made me laugh out loud. She writes like a friend telling her war stories over drinks. A rich array of absurd characters you could never get away with in fiction -- only the real world is this crazy, and her world was crazy squared. There's some artistic license in her characterizations, but hopefully readers get that the truest things are said in jest -- I don't doubt that everyone is exactly as a young Wendy perceived them. She's doomed to some backlash -- the trade-off for being honest. She's a true survivor of privilege which can be every bit as damaging as poverty. Highly recommended.

interesting

This book shows how the wealthy live.As I had expected their moral standards are less than you would think of someone with their education and way of living. I enjoyed this book very much. Surprisingly,it has more profane language than I had expected,but it is very interesting and once I started I could not put it down.I highly recommend it.

An outstanding pick for any lending library

DEAD END GENE POOL: A MEMOIR tells of Wendy, ancestor of one Cornelius Vanderbilt who grew up in a family once famous for wealth, but in the midst of decline. Her observations of her flawed family life and her memoir of heartbreak and courage provides a lively vision of a famous family whose fortunes have gone wrong, and is an outstanding pick for any lending library.

Most worthwhile read I've had in years

I very much enjoyed reading this book. I'm a fussy reader, and I don't finish most of the books I start. But this book I couldn't put down. Wendy Burden is an excellent writer and she does a beautiful job of delivering colorful and ceaselessly interesting stories about her complex family. My only wish is that she'd included more photos of her family. There are only a couple images on the jacket and I'd really like to put faces to the names of her family members.

A triumph of humor and compassion over privilege and bitterness

The trick to money is to have a lot, but not too much. What's too much? I could tell you --- I was once married to the daughter of the second or third richest woman in America --- but you probably wouldn't believe me. Better that you find out for yourself. Just start accumulating wealth. When you have enough, you'll feel great. When you have too much, some new friends --- gloom, anxiety and a nasty sense of meaninglessness --- will show up, and never leave. Guaranteed. Speaking of misery, let's consider the heritage of Cornelius Vanderbilt, in his day the richest man in America. (Here's just one of his estates.) Wendy Burden is his great-great-great granddaughter. It is astonishing, given her bloodline, that she could pull herself together enough to write Dead End Gene Pool. It's even more astonishing that she's alive. When Wendy was six, her father killed himself. After that, she writes, "I only spent time with my mother when she was getting ready to leave. My brother and I had recently come to view her as a glamorous lodger who rented the master bedroom suite." It would be easy to write this memoir from the Valley of Bitterness --- but then you'd have to live there. Wendy Burden chooses to reside on the Mountain of Absurdity. Smart move. Why waste energy on hating your mother when you can rip off lines like this, about Leslie Lepington Hamilton Burden dropping her young daughter at the airport and fleeing the jurisdiction: "She could make it downtown to Trader Vic's in less time than it takes to put on a pair of sheer black stockings and get the seams straight." So Wendy and her brothers fell, by default, into the care of their grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. William A.M. Burden II. He had been a successful investor, Ambassador to Belgium (oh, how he craved the post in Paris) and President of the Museum of Modern Art. But "Popsie" and "Gaga" were not exactly homey --- their Fifth Avenue apartment had 14 bathrooms and 21 rooms. The Burdens were ghosts; only their "servants" seemed real. Bill Burden had a breakthrough art collection. His wife "was a modern woman only when it came to self-medication." By the time Wendy showed up, their marriage consisted of gallons of wine, rich meals, afternoon naps, cocktails and dinner parties. William Burden's favorite word: Mah-velous. Really? You'll decide for yourself. Nature abhors a vacuum. Wendy and her brother filled the absence of adult supervision with an unending series of pranks. They were, by turns, destructive, cruel, stupid and funny. I lump them all into another category: life-saving. When you pass unseen through rooms, it's hard not to work at what Erik Erikson called "negative identity" --- "the sum of all those identifications and identity fragments which the individual had to submerge in himself as undesirable or irreconcilable." Mooning boaters who have slowed their engines to gawk at the Burdens house in Maine, stealing every bit of food from the kitchen, stretching Saran Wra