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The architect of desire : beauty and danger in the Stanford White family /

By:

Lessard, Suzannah

Material type: Text

TextPublisher: New York, N.Y. : Dial Press, 1996Description: 334 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type:

text

Media type:

unmediated

Carrier type:

volume

ISBN:

0385314450

Subject(s): DDC classification:

973.9/092/2 B 21

LOC classification:

HV6534.N5 L395 1996

Summary: Suzannah Lessard grew up on Box Hill, the Long Island estate built by her great-grandfather, Stanford White, the premier architect and social impresario of the Gilded Age. In 1906, on the rooftop theatre of the original Madison Square Garden, White was shot dead by the Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw, whose wife, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, White had seduced when she was sixteen. The highly publicized scandal, and the "trial of the century" that ensued, came to be mythologized in our culture and made ever more glamorous and romantic as the century rolled on. But on Box Hill, where four generations of the Stanford White family lived side by side, a tension-filled silence surrounded the eminent, charismatic figure in the family past. Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great-granddaughters. It was only in her thirties that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to Stanford's story and, by extension, the story of her clan in order to uncover its unacknowledged truths and to recognize the unacknowledged truths of her own life. As she delved deep into her family's past, one thing became unassailably clear; that behind both the family's silence and the romantic mythology that surrounded her great-grandfather's life lay an untold narrative of sexual compulsion gone out of control.

List(s) this item appears in: Richardson Collection

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Shelving location	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Reference	Carleton University, AVRC	Richardson Collection - Non CIrculating - Call No. Accompanied by Red Dot	Open-stacks	HV6534.N5 L395 1996 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not for loan		16055001157

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Previous	HT169.C32 T674 1995 Accidental city : the transformation of Toronto /	HT169.F72 P366155 2013 Paris reborn : Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the quest to build a modern city /	HT653.G7G57 Life in the English country house : a social and architectural history /	HV6534.N5 L395 1996 The architect of desire : beauty and danger in the Stanford White family /	LB1567.G88 1984 America's country schools /	LD4535.F8B675 University of Pennsylvania Library : Frank Furness /	LD5679 .H66 1987 The lawn : a guide to Jefferson's university /	Next

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The architect of desire : beauty and danger in the Stanford White family /

Browsing Carleton University, AVRC shelves, Shelving location: Open-stacks, Collection: Richardson Collection - Non CIrculating - Call No. Accompanied by Red Dot Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)