Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story - Softcover

Restor[es] Mrs. Astor to her throne.

An intimate and affectionate portrait of a woman who reinvented herself at age 56.--Bob Minzesheimer

A concise and engaging look at the tiny doyenne of society...Ms. Kiernan's book is most valuable as a catalog of all the things that Mrs. Astor did for us.--Hillary Frey

Kiernan...brings out the fascinating paradoxes of Brooke Astor's courageous, fiercely inventive career as a wife and a widow.

Kiernan resurrects the monument as she appeared when the author first met her, over lunch at the Carlyle in 1999: neither polished to a blinding luster nor especially tarnished, but imposing and original just the same.--Liesl Schillinger

This sympathetic telling of [Brooke Astor's] story should counterbalance all that gossipy sensationalism.

A gently revealing biography that does an especially good job of portraying Mrs. Astor before she was, well, Mrs. Astor.--Daniel Akst

The fabulous life of Brooke Astor, a pioneer of philanthropy and for decades a luminary of New York society. Hers is a story out of Edith Wharton. After a disastrous early marriage, Brooke Astor wedded the notoriously ill-tempered Vincent Astor, who died in 1959. In a highly publicized courtroom battle, Brooke fought off an attempt to break Vincent's will, which left some $67 million to the Vincent Astor Foundation. As the foundation's president, Brooke would use this legacy to benefit New York, where the Astor fortune had been made.Brooke would personally visit each grant applicant and charm anyone she met. At her one-hundredth birthday, princes and presidents honored her, but in 2006 a grandson petitioned the courts to have his father removed as Brooke's guardian. Once again an Astor court battle became the stuff of headlines. This biography based on firsthand knowledge and interviews with Brooke's friends and the heads of New York's great cultural institutions gives us back the woman so loved and admired, whose hands-on approach would inspire future philanthropists."