“[Patterson’s] life seems like a novel, and this biography reads like one, with names dropped, gossipy letters shared, and endless family turmoil revealed. Patterson was the anti–Paris Hilton, the society girl with the slightest of expectations who defied everyone, even the men who loved her, to succeed in an overwhelmingly male-dominated business. Book clubs will devour the story of this whip-smart woman’s life told in the wittiest of styles. Patterson herself would thoroughly approve.”
—Booklist (starred)
“A biography that fascinates as it illuminates. As they chronicle Patterson’s long editorship of Newsday, the Long Island paper she launched in 1940, the authors manage to dish delicious gossip about her three marriages and her long affair with Illinois governor and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. In long, sinuous sentences, the book paints a portrait of a unique and powerful woman, her ambitions only thwarted by the “vast gulf between men and women” that persisted even as so many things changed. Not only “a proud, briskly unsentimental woman,” Patterson emerges as a complicated person, one whose “own past, with its soup of vague and vivid memories, with its powerful and sometimes deafening tribal music,” weighed heavily, and often painfully. If the test of a biography is whether readers come to feel they truly know and care deeply about its subject, this one is a smashing success.”
—The Boston Globe
“Entertaining…a finely drawn, multigenerational portrait of life in the golden era of print journalism.”
—The New Yorker
“A vivid and entertaining biography…engagingly written…a rounded, clear-eyed portrait of a remarkable woman, a veritable force of nature.”
—Martin Rubin, The Wall Street Journal
“Each page [is] a cascade of digressions and asides that are just as engaging as the main storyline itself….This biography moves Alicia Patterson’s legend beyond the realm of family lore and establishes her as a singular and inspiring figure in 20th-century American history.”
—Nick Romeo, Christian Science Monitor
“[The Arlens] detail their subject’s exceptional life and career as her family moved among the wealthiest in the nation…Readers who enjoy biographies of compelling and powerful women will relish Patterson’s story, which is nicely interwoven with major events of the 20th century.”
—Library Journal
“[A] carefully researched and compelling biography.”
—Newsday
“The next best thing to having been the blue-blooded and gutsy Alicia Patterson is to read the Arlens’ fascinating, wittily told account of her life. Of course, it would also be nice to emulate Patterson by founding a Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper.”
—Patricia Marx, author of Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties
“Alicia Patterson made headlines (‘Society Girl Betrothed to One Man, as Another Gets License to Wed Her’) even before—as Newsday’s founder—she published them. Hers was a high-wire act of a life, as the tenth-grade expulsion for reading Anna Karenina might have suggested. Whether hunting tigers or establishing a newspaper, she is indomitable; she turns out as well to be irresistible in the Arlens’ luminous, spirited account.”
—Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life
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