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Seller's Description:
Good. 384 pages. Includes Acknowledgments, Prologue, Jennie, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Includes 36 black and white photographs. Some wear to cover and discoloration to text. Pencil erasure residue on first page. Ralph G. Martin (March 4, 1920-January 9, 2013) was an American journalist who authored or co-authored about thirty books, including popular biographies of recent historical figures, among which, Jennie, a two-volume study of Winston Churchill's American mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, became the most prominent bestseller. Other successful tomes focused on British royal romance (Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson in 1974, as well as Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1985) and on the Kennedy family. He studied at the University of Missouri from which he graduated in 1941 with a bachelor's degree in journalism. In December, following declaration of war in the aftermath of attack on Pearl Harbor, Martin enlisted in the Army and spent the war as a combat correspondent for the Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes and the Army weekly magazine, Yank. Returning to civilian life in 1945, Martin began working as editor for news and analysis publications Newsweek and The New Republic and became executive editor at decorating and domestic arts magazine House Beautiful. During the months preceding the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, he served as a member of the campaign staff for the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. If she had been simply the mother of Winston Churchill, her place in history would have been assured. But Jennie was the most fascinating and desirable woman of her age--the girl from Brooklyn who became the absolute monarch of British society--the beautiful rebel who lived and loved with an honesty that made her the toast--and the scandal--of two continents. Derived from a Kirkus Review: Undoubtedly the fact of their famous son Winston kept historians and biographers relatively circumspect in commenting on his parents, Lord Randolph and his Lady, the American debutante, Jennie Jerome. It is doubtless true that by the standards of Victoria's day the beautiful Jennie was a swinger. This first of a projected two volume biography is replete with racy speculation for such ideas as these: that Jennie cuckolded a complacent Randolph with metronomic regularity and that Randolph was a homosexual. That Jennie was probably preggers (the hefty Winston arrived a short seven months later) at the time of her marriage in 1874 is old news and so is the progressive syphilis that killed Lord Randolph only 20 years later. Vol. I leaves Jennie at this point--only 39, still beautiful, with only the money from her marriage settlement left after paying off her husband's debts. It reads with energy and Vol. II ought to be a doozey since Jennie went on to marry twice more, in one case, a very much younger man. It is to be hoped that along with that seldom mentioned aspect of her life. This is the life of a remarkable woman who refused to surrender her husband's robes of office with the words: "I am saving them for my son." And she lived to see him wear them, too.
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Seller's Description:
VERY GOOD. JACKET: GOOD DJ. 6X9. Vol 1 $8.95 DJ flap, AUTHOR SIGNED AND INSCRIBED on free endpaper, gold gilt lettering on spine, 404 pages, 1972 11th printing vol 2 498 pages, 1971, small bookshop plate on inside of front board _PAB_
