The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram

by Nicholas Faith

Book Overview

The story of the Bronfman family is a fascinating and improbable saga. It is dominated by "Mr. Sam," the single greatest figure in the history of the liquor business, the man who made drinking whiskey respectable in the United States and who in the 1950s and 1960s built Seagram into the first worldwide empire in wine and spirits. After Sam's death in 1971, his oldest son, Edgar, maintained the business, though he was distracted by his matrimonial...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031233219X
• ISBN13: 9780312332198
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 1.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.6" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Great Story, Adequate Telling

First my biases: I'm a Canadian by birth who once lived just a couple of miles from the Bronfman house in Regina. I now live in the NYC suburbs and stood marvelling at the Seagram bldg on Park Ave only 2 weeks ago. In the interim, I've been a consumer market researcher and Seagram has been a client off and on for more than 10 years. I'm also more than a bit interested in booze. Given the above, I find this book tremendously interesting with literally hundreds of details that were absolutely new to me... and I probably know more about the Bronfman family & Seagram than the average bear. If you're at all interested in the Bronfmans, Seagram or booze, you'll find this to be a fascinating read. But there are a lot of stylistic problems here as well. First, as other reviewers noted above, Faith's constant references to other authors / biographers is almost annoying. It's like he's personal friends with the other writers for goodness sake. Second, for some reason, Faith treats the Richler book (Solomon Gursky Was Here) as a more important reference source than personal interviews, biographies or other non-fiction sources. I read the Richler book and loved it but not sure why Faith needs to keep coming back to it? Third, the editing in this book is simply a mess - there's just no other word for it. Usually I don't even think about editing but with this book, it was so bad I almost stopped reading after the first 50 pages. In the first 4-5 chapters, Faith not only makes the same point multiple times but sometimes uses the same sentence! It was like deja-vu all over again. It's this last point that is most confusing to me - Faith is a former senior editor of The Economist so if anyone should get the editing right, its him. Anyway, I'll still give it 4 stars. Its a great story and filled in a lot of blanks for me.