Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The Corcoran Gallery of Art, located just two blocks from the White House, is a privately funded museum. It usually closes at 5 p. m. on Fridays, but on the night of October 24, 2008, the lights were still burning well into the evening. With a two-story atrium and a sweeping staircase, the museum is often rented out for weddings and parties. #2 Karine Albert McCall, a petite and slender sixty-eight-year-old blonde, had arrived with her husband, Donald McCall, a retired cellist. The grandchild of Charles Clark and his banking heiress wife, Celia, Karine had grown up in luxury at her grandmother’s San Francisco Tudor castle. #3 Huguette Clark was a client of Wallace Bock, an attorney who handled her legal affairs. She was close with Kamsler, her accountant, and would call him frequently. #4 The Clark family had a reunion at the museum, and while some were trust funders, others lived off their salaries. The senator had bequeathed an estimated $15 million to his surviving children, but fortunes have a way of diminishing as they pass through several generations.

When Huguette Clark died in the spring of 2011, the 104-year-old heiress left behind a 42-room apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue, a 23-acre estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara, a fortune estimated at $300 million and countless unanswered questions including why did she spend the last twenty years of her life hiding out in hospitals and collecting antique French porcelain dolls? Born in 1906, Huguette grew up in her family's 121-room Beaux Arts mansion in Manhattan and was one of the leading celebrities of her day. Her father William Andrews Clark, was a copper magnate, the second richest man in American, and not above bribing his way into the Senate. Huguette attended the coronation of King George V. And at twenty-two with a personal fortune of $50 million to her name, she married a Princeton man and childhood friend William MacDonald Gower. Two-years later the couple divorced. After a series of failed romances, Huguette began to withdraw from society--first living a few floors above her mother at 907 Fifth Avenue and after her mother's passing by herself in a vast apartment overlooking Central Park, eating crackers and watching The Flintstones with only hired help for company. Thanks to exclusive interviews with numerous members of Huguette Clark's inner circle, newly-discovered love letters, and archival material removed from her apartment, author Meryl Gordon finally solves the mystery of what turned a Jazz Age socialite into an Internet Era recluse. And what was her life like inside that gilded, copper cage?

From New York Times bestselling author Meryl Gordon, the definitive biography of Huguette Clark, who went from being one of the wealthiest and most famous Jazz Age socialites to spending the last twenty years of her life hiding out in hospitals. Born in 1906, Huguette Clark grew up in her family's 121-room Beaux Arts mansion in New York and was one of the leading celebrities of her day. Her father William Andrews Clark, was a copper magnate, the second richest man in America, and not above bribing his way into the Senate. Huguette attended the coronation of King George V. And at twenty-two with a personal fortune of $50 million to her name, she married a Princeton man and childhood friend William MacDonald Gower. Two-years later the couple divorced. After a series of failed romances, Huguette began to withdraw from society--first living with her mother in a kind of Grey Gardens isolation then as a modern-day Miss Havisham, spending her days in a vast apartment overlooking Central Park, eating crackers and watching The Flintstones with only servants for company. All her money and all her real estate could not protect her in her later life from being manipulated by shady hangers-on and hospitals that were only too happy to admit (and bill) a healthy woman. But what happened to Huguette that turned a vivacious, young socialite into a recluse? And what was her life like inside that gilded, copper cage?

The notorious life and times of one of the wealthiest women in 19th-century America Born into grinding poverty, Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Yet by the end of her life, "Madame Jumel" was one of the richest women in New York, with servants of her own and mansions in Manhattan and Saratoga Springs. During her remarkable life, she acquired a fortune from her first husband, a French merchant, and almost lost it to her second, the notorious vice president Aaron Burr. Divorcing Burr amid lurid charges of adultery, Jumel lived on triumphantly to the age of 90, astutely managing her property and public persona. After her death, while family members extolled her virtues, claimants to her estate painted a different picture: of a prostitute, the mother of George Washington's illegitimate son, and a wife who ruthlessly defrauded her husband and perhaps even plotted his death. With this book, author Margaret A. Oppenheimer draws from archival documents and court filings, many untouched since the 1800s, to tell the true and full story of Eliza Jumel.

Almost everybody has an obsession or feels a compulsion to do something a certain way. Magic numbers, intrusive thoughts, unusual fears and superstitions happen to about four people out of five, but where do these obsessive-compulsive (OC) traits come from? This book explores what they are, why we have them and what we can do about them, through fascinating and highly original insights. Are you a perfectionist, or can you be fussy? Do you like to have control in certain situations? Or are you overly anxious in others? These are all OC traits, and this book looks at their recent increase in human behaviour, and how they are formed in the brain. Showing that these traits are more common in highly educated, intelligent and successful people, it highlights the positive sides of what have previously been seen as negative quirks. Weaving together sections that are anecdotal and humorous, with technical and up-to-date scientific information, this groundbreaking book gives a fascinating introduction into an under-discussed personality type.