Steven M. L. Aronson

I'm not really a true crime fan, but once I started reading this book I became absolutely gripped and remained gripped right to the end. The reader knows, right from the outset what the bare bones of the 'crime' were, but what is so compelling is the big 'why'? How did a couple with so much going for them, money, charm, looks, intelligence turn out to be such appalling parents to their only child? Was their son born with the seeds of mental illness hard-wired into him, or did his problems show more stem from the way he was brought up plus the excessive use of dope when in his teens.
The authors have interviewed just about everyone who had any contact with the family, they have read the newspaper reports, psychiatric reports, letters from and to friends and relatived of the family , and the book which is divided into sections, puts extracts from all their researches together in a series of extracts. Through these the reader begins to build up a picture of each of the family members and also of the people with whom they interact. In fact the authors let you make up your own mind as to what each person was like and why things happened.
The whole story is a tragedy, a modern version of Orestes. show less

A spellbinding tale of money and madness, incest and matricide, Savage Grace is the saga of Brooks and Barbara Baekeland -- beautiful, rich, worldly -- and their handsome, gentle son, Tony. Alternately neglected and smothered by his parents, he was finally driven to destroy the whole family in a violent chain of events. Savage Grace unfolds against a glamorous international background (New York, London, Paris, Italy, Spain); features a nonpareil cast of characters (including Salvador Dalí, show more James Jones, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and European nobility); and tells the doomed Baekelands' story through remarkably candid interviews, private letters, and diaries, not to mention confidential hospital, State Department, and prison documents. A true-crime classic, it exposes the envied lives of the rich and beautiful, and brilliantly illuminates the darkest corners of the American Dream. show less

An interestingly constructed book, with leaf-shaped tops to pages that swivel on a rivet. Not very practical for field identification; even sitting on the bookshelf the oddly protruding leaf margins tend to get bent. Could be useful for a botany student as a flash-card-like study aid, or, for children at the middle-school collecting stage who may be interested in the varieties of North American trees, it's like holding a collection of tree leaves, bark, and photos in your hand.

The two authors combine the approaches of an oral hisotry, delivered in paragraph-length quotations and excerpts with a mixed timeline. (The murder and incareration is described intermingled with the events leading up to it, including multiple generations of family history.) The result makes me feel that we are not read a book, but the notes that could have resulted in a very good book. Tony Baekeland is for removed from the inventory of plastics in time that it seems a mere distraction or show more subject for a different book to explore that as much as is done here.

All that aside, this is not so much as a true crime narrative, but a multi-faceted recollection of Tony Baekeland, an heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, whose greatest hurdles in life come not from the want, but from an incestuous power struggle withhis mother Barbara while absent an engaged father (Brooks Baekeland). Struggling with his homosexuality without family support and desperate for individuation yet lacking the will to leave the stifling fold, Tony goes down the road to matricide, a knife assault on his grandmother after beaureaucratic inefficiency leads to his release and, finally, an ironic if possibly dubious suicide by plastic bag. show less