Word: baekeland
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When family conflict erupts in murder, bereaved survivors usually say the outburst was unforeseeable, unimaginable. That is particularly true when the killer is, like Plastics Heir Antony Baekeland, an attractive and intelligent young man whose literary promise has been asserted by notables like Novelist James Jones. But when Tony Baekeland murdered his mother, few people in the family's circle were altogether surprised. Some of them suggested that Barbara Baekeland, a social-climbing former model who gave her son smother love but no stability, had been courting her own death. Said Attorney Samuel Shaw: "That's a real question...
...Tony Baekeland grew up with two competing family identities. His great-grandfather, Leo Baekeland, was the inventor of Bakelite and the "father of plastics." His parents fancied themselves aristocrats. They socialized with Greta Garbo and Tennessee Williams, the Duchess of Sutherland and Yasmin Aga Khan. But they were vagabonds, getting by on good looks, lordly manners and copious spending. Brooks Baekeland was a self-proclaimed writer who never published. His wife was an artist too busy to paint. Each of them had a love of danger and a propensity for violence. Each seemed more interested in boasting of Tony...
...self-destruction among the elite. The mélange is repetitive yet oddly incomplete, particularly about the family's finances. The absence of a sustained narrative and the mixed-up chronology demand a slow, close reading. There is no attempt at redeeming social importance, and one wonders why Brooks Baekeland and other central characters allowed such an invasion of privacy. Still, the story is evoked with arresting detail. The structural weaknesses of Savage Grace do not lessen the power of horror. --By William A. Henry...
Plastics Bakelite is not sexy. But when New York chemist Leo Baekeland invented it in 1907 by tightly controlling the heat and pressure of volatile chemical reactions, he created the first completely synthetic substance. Hardened and shaped, Bakelite--or phenol formaldehyde--was impervious to heat, acids and electricity, allowing its use in everything from cookware to adhesives to car electrical systems. Chemists were soon making all sorts of polymers, launching a plastic century...