The fascinating biography of the maverick newspaperwoman and intrepid adventurer, which follows her exceptional exploits through the first half of the twentieth century, from her troublemaking days as the middle child of complicated parents to her successes as publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsday.
ALICE ARLEN is the author of Cissy Patterson. As co-screenwriter
with Nora Ephron, she was nominated for an Academy Award for
Silkwood (1982). She died in 2016.
MICHAEL J. ARLEN was, for many years, staff writer and television
critic for The New Yorker. He is the author of numerous books-among
them- Exiles (1970) was short-listed for a National Book Award, and
Passage to Ararat (1975) won a National Book Award.
"[Patterson's] life seems like a novel, and this biography reads
like one, with names dropped, gossipy letters shared, and endless
family turmoil revealed. Patterson was the anti-Paris Hilton, the
society girl with the slightest of expectations who defied
everyone, even the men who loved her, to succeed in an
overwhelmingly male-dominated business. Book clubs will devour the
story of this whip-smart woman's life told in the wittiest of
styles. Patterson herself would thoroughly approve."
--Booklist (starred) "A biography that fascinates as it
illuminates. As they chronicle Patterson's long editorship of
Newsday, the Long Island paper she launched in 1940, the authors
manage to dish delicious gossip about her three marriages and her
long affair with Illinois governor and presidential candidate Adlai
Stevenson. In long, sinuous sentences, the book paints a portrait
of a unique and powerful woman, her ambitions only thwarted by the
"vast gulf between men and women" that persisted even as so many
things changed. Not only "a proud, briskly unsentimental woman,"
Patterson emerges as a complicated person, one whose "own past,
with its soup of vague and vivid memories, with its powerful and
sometimes deafening tribal music," weighed heavily, and often
painfully. If the test of a biography is whether readers come to
feel they truly know and care deeply about its subject, this one is
a smashing success."
--The Boston Globe "Entertaining...a finely drawn,
multigenerational portrait of life in the golden era of print
journalism."
--The New Yorker "A vivid and entertaining biography...engagingly
written...a rounded, clear-eyed portrait of a remarkable woman, a
veritable force of nature."
--Martin Rubin, The Wall Street Journal
"Each page [is] a cascade of digressions and asides that are just
as engaging as the main storyline itself....This biography moves
Alicia Patterson's legend beyond the realm of family lore and
establishes her as a singular and inspiring figure in 20th-century
American history."
--Nick Romeo, Christian Science Monitor "[The Arlens] detail their
subject's exceptional life and career as her family moved among the
wealthiest in the nation...Readers who enjoy biographies of
compelling and powerful women will relish Patterson's story, which
is nicely interwoven with major events of the 20th century."
--Library Journal "[A] carefully researched and compelling
biography."
--Newsday "The next best thing to having been the blue-blooded and
gutsy Alicia Pat-terson is to read the Arlens' fascinating, wittily
told account of her life. Of course, it would also be nice to
emulate Patterson by founding a Pulitzer Prize-winning
newspaper."
--Patricia Marx, author of Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to
Maintain My Mental Faculties "Alicia Patterson made headlines
('Society Girl Betrothed to One Man, as Another Gets License to Wed
Her') even before--as Newsday's founder--she published them. Hers
was a high-wire act of a life, as the tenth-grade expul-sion for
reading Anna Karenina might have suggested. Whether hunting tigers
or establishing a newspaper, she is indomitable; she turns out as
well to be irresistible in the Arlens' luminous, spirited
account."
--Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life
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