Wendy BurdenBesprekingen

I am really surprised by some of these reviews. I picked this book up per the recommendation of Kristyn at McLean and Eakin in Petoskey, Michigan, and I couldn't put it down. The author is hilarious, the story is compelling and the writing is stellar. How could anyone think otherwise? Here are some of my favorite lines from a description of Christmas morning:

The grown-ups finally emerged and gathered by the fireplace in the living room, my grandparents still in their dressing gowns. Uncle Bob, the oldest, already had a five o'clock shadow. He had to shave about five times a day in order to not look like a gangster....For the Christmas festivities he was dressed in his usual barge basement clothing--an ill-fitting sports jacket and a pair of worn slacks....The second-in-line entered the living room like he was being chased by a bee. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham was clutching a slopping cup of coffee in one hand and cigarette in a holder in the other. His shirttails were out, and his Yuletide red tie was as askew as a guy with the social skills of a five year old could make it...
My grandfather sat in the molded plywood-and-steel Eames side chair he always sat in on Christmas morning, with a plate of butter-soaked English muffins and the thermos of coffee he was always served on a small table before him, extracting presents from his ermine-trimmed stocking with his long, slow fingers just like he always did. My grandmother was on the purple couch, a poodle on each side, doing the same. They both exhibited genuine surprise as they unwrapped their gifts. "Popsie! Earrings from Verdura! How divine--"
My grandmother, however, did not seem too surprised by the necklace of red and green millipedes I'd made for her with the Creepy Crawlers set I'd gotten for my eighth birthday the week before. Nor did my grandfather swoon with pleasure over the paint-by-numbers horse head on black velvet I'd given him, intending for him to replace the Klee in the hallway with it."

That snippet doesn't even begin to do the book justice. Well worth a read! I highly recommend it.

Highly entertaining. Too see first hand how the ultra ultra wealthy lived is always fascinating to me.

This book is a bit like the train wreck you can't take your eyes off. It certainly demonstrates that even extreme wealth cannot make everything better. On some pages, it is fascinating (like active monkeys at the zoo) - the rich really do live differently. But the book shows a striking dichotomy of life that The author lived. When with her uber-rich paternal grandparents, she had access to the life of luxury, but when she was with her mother at home - they often lived (in later years) in near squalor. The thread that runs through both sides of the family is alcoholism (and other substance abuse). Like other reviewers, I wish more family photos had been included. It is a great fast read when you need something truly different to shake things up.

Hilarious! I only wish Wendy had included pictures of her family.½

“Sepulchrally dismal, she was the three-dimensional equivalent of woe.”

My third memoir for the year, Wendy Burden’s Dead End Gene Pool is a dizzying ride through the lives of the ultra-rich descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt, starting briefly with her grandparents’ antecedents, focussing for quite some time on Wendy’s childhood, which was heavily influenced by her paternal grandparents, and moving into her teenage and student years.

The first half of this book was highly comic – Wendy recounting the tales of her forebears, over-moneyed, over-sexed and often under-endowed with sanity. Similarly the stories of her early childhood, mostly revolving around her grandparents and their staff at the New York mansion. As Wendy grows older, though, the anecdotes get a bitter edge and the book becomes one of those ubiquitous misery memoirs of growing up with an alcoholic single parent. The grandparents become senile and sadly dependent, rather than amusing.

Memoirs are clearly a form of non-fiction that I am coming to enjoy, though – I very much enjoyed Sleeping Naked Is Green and The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance (when I wrote that review, I hoped I’d never have to write the title again. It seems to be following me).

Worth reading if you are interested in rich American people. Otherwise, there’s funnier material out there.

Great for 3/4 but gets tiring toward the end. Excessively dysfunctional family of mind boggling wealth.

So few books I can say I actually have laughed out loud! All about a privileged family, part of the Vanderbilt clan, that becomes harder and harder to hide from society. The author makes the story very funny and interesting. Sort of a "be careful what you wish for" thing.½

I liked this book. It was funny and touching at the same time. It's a quick but good read. I would definitely recommend it!

Another true tale of family dysfunction and neglect but this time the neglected child is a Vanderbilt and the neglect comes packaged in mink coats and fabulous trips to Paris. Supposedly 'darkly humorous and satirical' I found this book interesting (as in watching a car crash interesting) but in the end I just didn't care about Wendy Burden or her tragic life - perhaps because she never really lets you in on her emotions but rather writes a series of vignettes about her alcoholic grandparents, her alcoholic mother, her drug addicted uncles, her confused brothers etc etc. Yes, an unfortunate and lonely childhood and not one I would wish on anyone but in the end she couldn't make me care.

Excellently entertaining, in the rubbernecking car crash way I think the book was intended. Never have I been so glad to be lower middle class and from a well-adjusted family. It's hard to tell how reliable this narrator actually is, as she switches seamlessly from the drama of her younger self to future recollections. But really, it's HER story of HER experience with HER cuckoo wealthy family rather than an accurate chronicle.

Wendy Burden's Dead End Gene Pool (Gotham, 2011) is a darkly comic look at the tragic dysfunctionality of the American super-rich. The great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Burden spent much of her childhood in what her semi-exiled mother called "Burdenland," a parallel universe inhabited by the very wealthy.

Shuttled from one house to another depending on the season, Burden and her brothers grew up in the lap of luxury, but luxury with a sharp undercurrent of alcoholism, drug abuse, mental instability, and not a whole lot of TLC. While they wanted for (almost) nothing material, to hear Burden tell it there certainly wasn't much love or human understanding to be experienced.

This might have been an extremely depressing book (and is, in parts), except for Burden's keen sense of the absurdities she witnessed and her ability to bring out the humor in situations that some of the rest of us might not have been able to laugh off. Sharp, poignant, and hilarious, this memoir makes for great reading.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2011/02/book-review-dead-end-gene-pool.html

Everyone believes they come from a dysfunctional family of sorts, but Wendy Burden's tales convincingly place hers in a top tier. Her account of her ultra rich family's indulgences and shocking neglect of one another provides shivers of schadenfreude. Suicide and alcoholism only scrape the surface. Burden writes unapologtically and entertainingly. (Laughed out loud over her rendering of Concorde flight to Paris seated next to Jacques Cousteau who became miffed when she failed to feel him up.) So many reviewers playfully cite F. SCott Fitzgerald's "the rich are different than you and me" to describe this book. To this I might add another favorite from The Great Gatsby: "...as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."½

What a brilliant tale of the uber rich and uber indugled and what a sad, sad, sad life they have.
Wendy is the great great great great great grandaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and both sides have long illustrious lines of Americana.
She is a brilliant storyteller with tales of too much money and not enough brains (or sense) for a family.

Do people really think that the wealthy are immune from family troubles? Is there anyone out there that thinks money buys happiness anymore? Because sometimes reading these tragic-family-memoirs involving the rich lead me to think that they think we're all putting them up on a pedestal as "model" families. However, it seems that growing up wealthy in an eccentric and dysfunction family is evidently reason enough to write a memoir. Strange family tales are all the rage these days, I understand, and Wendy Burden is a pretty good writer, so it wasn't terrible to read. It was actually pretty funny sometimes. Is it memorable? Not really. Is there some greater message being conveyed? Nope. She's not terribly angry at her family, or trying to reconcile her idea of them to the reality of them, or working out some deep-held emotional issues; she's just telling us some humorous, and sometimes tragic, stories about her wacky, incredibly rich family. I think the moral is this: you can have a lot of money and still have messed-up parents.

Hillarious memoir that completely defines people who have more money than sense.

Turns out the rich ARE different, and not in a good way. SO not in a good way. Wendy Burden's memoir of her childhood in the prison of Vanderbilt riches and expectations is touted as hilariously funny, and perhaps it is, if you can overlook the sheer tragedy of a small child trying to cope with a parent's suicide, rampant family alcoholism, her mother's sex addiction and other miseries too numerous to numerate. Call me bleeding heart, but I have several daughters, and I found this memoir, satirical, yes; often clever, yes; but funny? No, no, no. I wanted to snatch little Wendy and her brothers away from these monsters masquerading as loving family. She must be in her late forties now, but her voice is still the voice of a defiant adolescent, covering with bravado the heartbreak of living in a world without love.

In every memoir you have to decide: can I trust this narrator? Does this person remember her life clearly? Is she just trying to make her life look better/worse than it really was? Wendy Burden tackles this problem head on. Holding nothing back, Burden documents her deranged childhood with humor and guilt about her situation.

After a brief family fascinating family history, Dead End Gene Pool takes us right into the depths of Burdenland-a world of the ultrarich and the ultradisturbed. Ironically, Burden handled all of this tragedy with satire. She mocked herself, and in that mocking I felt deeply sorry for her. My empathy for her and her life was not something I anticipated. I truly thought, “Oh, no. Here is another poor little rich girl story. Let’s hear about real tragedy.” But Burden’s use of comedy showed me that any life has tragedy. That sadness is sadness, and that (of course) money doesn’t make life better. In fact, it seems like lots of it makes life worse.

This self effacing comedy is best demonstrated in Burden’s comments about her absent mother. Some of these observations were so funny that I laughed out loud, despite the heartbreak of the situation. For example, after a three year absence, Wendy’s baby brother is stunned to see his long lost mother. To describe this event, Burden says that, “baby Edward was surprised to discover that he was not, in fact, the miracle child of a Scottish nanny and an African-American cook.” The tragedies continue (too many to mention, too sad to think about), but her likability stayed until the last page.

The neglect and the misfortune of these children would have been too much to handle without Burden’s humor, and her story would have been boring without the extreme excess. Swinging somewhere between indulgent and apologetic, Burden hit the nail on the head. I, unlike her mother, enjoyed my time in Burdenland. And I was happy to see they all got out alive, and I was very happy to give my normal, middle-class parents a big hug!

On finishing the book, I don't know how to describe Dead End Gene Pool except, to say, it was just plain odd. (For that reason alone, it receives a couple of stars). Some of this was absolutely hysterical--laugh out loud funny. There were parts I found very touching and sad. At times I just read it with a sense of disbelief. I have to say I gave up trying to keep (unnecessary) details of the family tree straight. That said, it was a quick and entertaining read. Congrats to Wendy Burden: for making it through such a convoluted set of personal life experiences...and then to write about those experiences in such a humorous and captivating way.

This is an odd occasionally off-putting memoir, which was nevertheless riveting. Wendy Burden, the great-great-great-great-grandaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, devotes the majority of her lively memoir to her childhood, which is spent largely in the company of her filthy-rich grandparents, and debauched, appearance-obsessed mother, all of whom indulge liberally in alcohol. Wendy herself is often a cruel, spoiled brat, a fact she doesn't shrink from, but she usually has good reason to lash out, not least because she is openly snubbed as an unwelcome girl child in a family of coddled male heirs. The narrative is oddly disconnected, jumping around in time, and it is often difficult to keep bloodlines straight, but this is a riveting read, and voyeuristic peek into how the wealthy live.

Wendy Burden’s account of her childhood traumas explains why social services exist today. If even half of the events in this book are true, I am surprised she has lived long enough to tell the tale and has not succumbed to some form of severe substance abuse or suicide. Her childhood, although materially rich by anybody’s standards, was pitifully poor in love, compassion, and most forms of normalcy. Reading this book truly made me thankful for the family that I have.

However, the writing style in this book is prone to exaggeration, or so it seems. Sometimes I wondered if the events were retold as they actually happened, or if they were exaggerated for effect. Maybe both. Toward the middle of the book, it also seemed that the storyline became something of a one-trick pony. The shock value of the relatives' antics rubbed off after awhile, leaving the reader looking for some other form of action to fill the void. Unfortunately, there is none. The ending is not surprising, and there is not much to redeem from her family in the end.

That being said, there were some sections that were brilliantly hilarious. I often found myself laughing out loud over Wendy’s interactions with the farting grandma and the grandpa who could only say, “Phooey.” I am not one to laugh out loud over things I watch or read, so to have multiple moments like this from one book is really quite an accomplishment.

Overall, I found this book to be enjoyable, but it is not something that I would read a second time.

I may be in the minority here, but I really did NOT care for this book. I couldn't find anything of lasting interest in this memoir. It may be that the only reason it got published was because the author, Wendy Burdens, is descended from THE Vanderbilts. That wasn't enough to make it interesting to me. I was left wondering if she has any relatives left that even acknowledge her.

I loved this! No, really... I did. Wendy Burden has a self-deprecating twisted sense of humor. What's not to love? She's brutally honest about all her of her family's flaws without wallowing one bit in self pity. I'm not sure how she manages to pull it off, but pull it off she does. Yes, it's a 'poor little rich girl' type of tale, and yet I never get the impression she's looking for our pity, but instead just a bit of understanding. Her childhood was peopled with larger than life relatives, her paternal grandparents especially. I would warn you, if you don't have a sense of humor you might want to pass on this. The humor is what keeps it from being completely heartbreaking.

Note: I read in an online interview that there will be more memoirs to come from Wendy Burden, and I am happy about that!½

Wendy Burden has certainly put the fun back in dysfunction! My god, Dead End Gene Pool was a disturbing, hilarious, and utterly fabulous memoir about a famous and extremely wealthy family we’ve all heard about – The Vanderbilts.

Memoirs always have a special place in my heart, but this one … well, I just loved it, for more reasons than I could possibly list here. Wendy Burden really knows how to tell a story, and she was unlucky (or lucky, depending on how you look at it) enough to have a family that was so wacky and dysfunction that you have to laugh along (rather than cry as you should) with her for the entire length of this novel. You just can’t help yourself but laugh, because her life was full of crazy-ass people and despite all of it, she learned how to make fun of it rather than complain. Sure, there are plenty of moments in this book that aren’t pretty, but that’s life – messy, tragic, and you survive it by finding the humor in it. I laughed my butt off today when I was looking for a picture of the book cover, and I noticed many reviews referring to her life as ”tragically flawed.” Everyone has flaws, and the tragedy in that is that most of us try to hide them rather embrace them and get over them. If Ms. Burden had written a book that watered down all the family dysfunction, you wouldn’t be reading a review of her book on this blog, because who wants to read a non-tragically flawed life in a memoir? Not this girl, which is exactly why I asked to review this book. I HATE IT when other book reviewers write things like “in the tradition of so-and-so famous author” or “in the style of,” so I promise you that I wouldn’t dare to compare Wendy to another fabmous memoirist that I love. Let me say this – she’s good, she has her own story, and that’s that. I will say that I enjoyed the hell out of this book, and if Wendy had any other memoir in print, I’d certainly want to read them (and review them) as well.

To read the rest of my review, visit my blog:

http://thegirlfromtheghetto.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/dead-end-gene-pool-by-wendy...

A few days after I finished this one, I realized that not much really happened in it, but that it really didn't matter as I found the book enjoyable anyway. A chronicle of the Vanderbilt family, and the effects of staggering wealth on its various members and associates, the humorous and often tragic character sketches are testament to the depleted energy and shaky moral character that remains in the family. Wendy Burden's account of her childhood spent with servants, often bitter and petty grandparents who hold the purse-strings, and a mother in search of romance and the perfect tan, is both entertaining and alarming as neglect and glitz combine in her life.

Let me start by saying I couldn't finish Dead End Gene Pool. I felt disengaged from the first chapter and never found my entrance into the material.

Burden starts out with a prologue introducing us to Cornelius Vanderbilt and taking us through her family line on down to the birth of her father and eventually to her brother, Will, and finally herself. Once we get into the memoir itself, I start to lose interest. The Burden children are seven and eight and enroute to visit relatives when their plane meets some turbulence and we get our first glimpse of Wendy Burden's sense of her place in the family. "Being a girl meant squat in my father's family."

Using this plane ride as an introduction, we jump to the grandparents, or Gran, or Popsie with small bits of the children's mother as well as her uncles on her father's side. The major disconnect for me starts with the description of the grandparent's German chauffeur, George, who is suspected of being a Nazi. This fascination with George's heritage is fueled by Uncle Ham's deep interest in all things regarding the Third Reich as well as Wendy Burden's "humor." "German people liked to cover their lamps with...the skin of Jews gassed at Auschwitz." I didn't find it "wickedly funny", "intriguing", "quirky" or any of the other adjectival words on the back.

We move on to Christmas with Wendy Burden's paternal family. Uncle Ham is excited to receive a book on Hermann Goring while Wendy receives an Easy Bake oven which she calls a "crematorium." I'm sure, again, this is meant to be funny because she probably means putting dolls or other toys in the Easy Bake but, for me, here is where I give up.