Couverture de Empty Mansions

Empty Mansions

The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

 Aperçu
Essayez pour 0,99 €/mois Essayer pour 0,00 €
Offre valable jusqu'au 29 janvier 2026 à 23 h 59.
Jusqu'à 90% de réduction sur vos 3 premiers mois.
Écoutez en illimité des milliers de livres audio, podcasts et Audible Originals.
Sans engagement. Vous pouvez annuler votre abonnement chaque mois.
Accédez à des ventes et des offres exclusives.
Écoutez en illimité un large choix de livres audio, créations & podcasts Audible Original et histoires pour enfants.
Recevez 1 crédit audio par mois à échanger contre le titre de votre choix - ce titre vous appartient.
Gratuit avec l'offre d'essai, ensuite 9,95 €/mois. Possibilité de résilier l'abonnement chaque mois.

Empty Mansions

De : Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr.
Lu par : Kimberly Farr
Essayez pour 0,99 €/mois Essayer pour 0,00 €

3 mois pour 0,99 €/mois, puis 9,95 €/mois. Possibilité de résilier chaque mois. Offre valable jusqu'au 29 janvier 2026 à 23 h 59.

9,95 € par mois après 30 jours. Résiliez à tout moment.

Acheter pour 18,39 €

Acheter pour 18,39 €

3 mois pour 0,99 €/mois

Après 3 mois, 9.95 €/mais. Offre soumise à conditions.

À propos de ce contenu audio

 When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?

Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world.

Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else.

The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic.

Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms.

The audiobook edition includes bonus audio featuring phone calls between Paul Clark Newell, Jr. and Huguette Clark—believed to be the only known recording of her voice.

Praise for Empty Mansions

“An exhaustively researched, well-written account . . . a blood-boiling expose [that] will make you angry and will make you sad.”—The Seattle Times

“An evocative and rollicking read, part social history, part hothouse mystery, part grand guignol.”—The Daily Beast

“A childlike, self-exiled eccentric, [Huguette Clark] is the sort of of subject susceptible to a biography of broad strokes, which makes Empty Mansions, the first full-length account of her life, impressive for its delicacy and depth.”—Town & Country

“A spellbinding mystery.”—Booklist Amériques Divertissement et célébrités Développement commercial et entrepreneuriat Femmes États-Unis
Les membres Amazon Prime bénéficient automatiquement de 2 livres audio offerts chez Audible.

Vous êtes membre Amazon Prime ?

Bénéficiez automatiquement de 2 livres audio offerts.
Bonne écoute !

    Avis de l'équipe

    "Empty Mansions is at once an engrossing portrait of a forgotten American heiress and a fascinating meditation on the crosswinds of extreme wealth. Hugely entertaining and well researched, Empty Mansions is a fabulous read." (Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire)

    Commentaires

    "Empty Mansions is a dazzlement and a wonder. Bill Dedman and Paul Newell unravel a great character, Huguette Clark, a shy soul akin to Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird - if Boo’s father had been as rich as Rockefeller. This is an enchanting journey into the mysteries of the mind, a true-to-life exploration of strangeness and delight." (Pat Conroy, author of The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son)
    Aucun commentaire pour le moment