Tom Sancton

Wow, what a mess. The story of the Bettencourt Affair is a tangled web. A wealthy woman is taken advantage of by her staff, by her companion, and by her own daughter. Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress to the L'Oreal cosmetic fortune, was fantastically wealthy. As she descended into the depths of Alzheimer's disease, that wealth and the management of it would come to the forefront of French political and judicial life.

The book presents the facts surrounding the case in a very readable way. Who's the bigger villain, the daughter or the photographer companion? It's tough to say. Both are obviously greedy. I had no idea about this story until I read the book. Its description, as well as the views of wealth in French society, were fascinating to me.

A good read.… (meer)

Perhaps less well-known today than the kidnapping of one of the Getty heirs by a group of Italian mobsters, the snatching of Franco-Belgian industrialist Baron Édouard-Jean Empain from a Paris street grabbed just as many headlines in the 1970s. Tom Sancton's book covers the kidnapping itself—which included the rather gruesome amputation of one of Empain's fingers as a proof of life—as well as both how the Empain family amassed its fortune in the first place (brutal and bloody colonial exploitation in the Congo; probable collaboration with the Nazis) and how that fortune dissipated in the aftermath of the kidnapping. Empain's reputation as a businessman took a hit from which it never recovered, and let's just say that his family didn't welcome him back with the kind of warmth you might expect. This is a briskly readable mash-up of a work of true-crime with a multi-generational examination of wealth and dysfunction, but for me Sancton didn't quite manage to articulate the significance of why this series of events was worthy of chronicling in a book. (To be clear, I think there are framings that could do that, but Sancton doesn't construct them here.)… (meer)