The Nutcracker

by Shana Alexander and Alexander Shana

Book Overview

1985, Doubleday, Hardcover, ISBN: 0385192681, Book Condition: UsedVeryGood, , 134604 13D This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385192681
• Release Date: May 1985
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Length: 444 Pages
• Weight: 4.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The book would have been complete with pictures!

That is the only reason that I gave this book 4 stars rather than a deserved 5 stars. I remember watching the six hour mini-series starring the late Lee Remick and Inga Swenson as Frances Schrueder and her sister Marilyn. It left an impression on me that I had to read this book. When Shana Alexander just died, I just bought it and it's riveting and fascinating into the mind of Frances Schrueder who manipulated and controlled her children. The writing is excellent in the book but it lacks pictures of the people very much involved in this sad tragedy. If only Frances received the help she desperately needed in college, maybe the circumstances would have been very different. I don't think she is a manic depressive but very narcissitic like Betty Broderick in California. Frances is a complicated, mysterious woman who often never gains friendship or true love in her life. Her mother does everything for her but yet Frances is unrelentingly possessive, greedy, and money-hungry or just obsessive about it to get her own sons to play a part in gaining her undeserving inheritance.

Charming

Oh boy. Just how much intense, stupid madness can one family harbor? The story reads like a parody of human behavior. Alexander's narrative, chuck full of detail and precise diction and some wonderful turns of phrase, often spirals into something like a long-running slapstick comedy too bizarre for television. The horror of neglect and greed, hatred, prejudice and violence are all here, but the form they take in this tale is so absurd sometimes that you have to laugh aloud at the sick antics.The three most important characters are: Franklin Bradshaw, the miserly patriarch, apparently murdered by his grandsons at the insistence of his youngest daughter, Frances, an incredibly depraved creature nobody could have invented, and Berenice, mother of Frances and husband of Franklin, a slavish practitioner of "smotherly love." They hail from Utah where Franklin is a non-practicing Mormon. He has spent a lifetime of working sixteen hours a day and has, through his auto parts business and oil and land leases, amassed a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions of (1981) dollars. Frances and everybody else in the family would like to get their hands on the money, and each of them is deathly afraid that the others are scheming to cheat them out of their fair share, and they are. But Frances, the youngest of the four Bradshaw children, is particularly evil. She is the pretty baby of the family that no one could ever say no to, who always got away with everything as a child and expects that to continue. When the world says, "Whoa, child, no!" she fights back with every scheme and wile she can muster, committing nearly any and all crimes imaginable. She usually gets away with them because she has a quality about her that prevents anyone from saying no to her, at least anyone in her family. She is perhaps as neglectful a mother as one can imagine, physically beating and mentally torturing her children, using them as pawns in her wars with her two ex-husbands and her parents and sisters. She is an alcoholic, a drug addict, a paranoid schizophrenic, a bigot, a class-conscious low life, who hates blacks, Jews and poor white trash; a woman who is as trashy as one can get, yet a woman who manages to manipulate her mother and father and others so that she always has time to drink and whore around and send her children to private schools (even as she pushes them out the door in the morning in their underwear without breakfast or bath).But enough. It's a good read, and I have to admire Alexander's writing ability. She makes it all very vivid and she does it with style and grace and without taking up some phony political position or presenting some shallow psychology. She sparkles the narrative with insight and bon mots and never slows down or bores.

FRANCES SCHREUDER IS A FASCINATING WOMAN

Shana Alexander, a great woman writer, author of "Very Much a Lady" the story of Jean Haris, helps you understand one of the most fascinating and horryfing criminal cases and trials of the century. That of a manipualtive mother with a sick, greed-filled mind willing to sacrifice her own son in order to lay her hands on her father's fortune, he being one of the richest men in Utah. But luck wasn't available for the cold-blooded Manhattan socialite, and she is put to jail. An excellent book of investigation of one of the most bizarre cases of greed in America's history