Matt Rothschild

6 out of 5 ⭐️s. Rothschild’s writing is amazing.
His grandma is a FORCE without a filter. She does not suffer fools especially if they’re trying to mess with her grandson. He gets himself into all sorts of situations but for complex reasons.

One of the best books I’ve read this year. I’ll be pushing it on friends. 🙂

Reviewed by Cat for TeensReadToo.com

So you think being raised by wealthy Jewish grandparents in a Fifth Avenue apartment, twelve years of prep and boarding schools, regular trips to FAO Schwartz, chauffeured limousines, or visiting Mom at her husband's Italian villa also means a life on easy street?

Then you haven't read Matt Rothschild's family memoir, DUMBFOUNDED.

In his memoir, Matt paints a lush and detailed portrait of life as a complex, awkward outsider in a world that demands conformity show more and simple definition. Despite growing up in a completely different environment, I felt a constant sense of familiarity and kinship with Matt, whether he was describing the painful silence that greeted his a capella rendition of "Get Happy" for the sixth-grade talent show, spinning tales of his midget butler, Little Saigon, in the hopes of pleasing his fickle grandmother, or confronting an ever-increasing awareness that his sexuality might not fit society's definition of "normal."

Matt's story runs the gamut of human emotion from laugh-out-loud hilarity to chest-aching heartbreak. DUMBFOUNDED is first and foremost a book about people, and it reminds us that once stripped of all our ideological constructs (wealth, race, faith, gender, orientation, nationality, etc.), at our core, we're all pretty much the same. show less

This is one of the more enjoyable memoirs I've read in recent memory. When I closed the book, I wanted more. Rothschild (yep, one of those Rothschilds) was raised by his idiosyncratic, irreverent and truly lovable grandparents. He was, to put it mildly, a bit of a handful. Less a peek into the rich-and-famous-life and more an illustration of how to put the fun in dysfunctional, it's a book that avoids mean-spiritedness and honors love. Highly recommended.

This author graduated from my college (somewhat after I did). I enjoyed reading about his childhood in a super-rich family; clearly money really can't buy everything. The beginning of the book is the funniest (e.g., when the grandfather is dismayed that the chauffer drives up in the white Rolls after labor day--what will the neighbors think?), but by the end of the book, the narrator had earned my respect.