Word: tifft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones; Summit; 574 pages...
...last and best -- certainly by far the most inclusive -- comes, fittingly, from Alex Jones, whose reporting about the Binghams in the New York Times won a 1987 Pulitzer Prize and alerted publishers to the saga's dramatic potential. He and his co-author and wife, Susan Tifft, a TIME associate editor, have induced virtually all the members of this tortured family to expose seemingly every intimate detail, as if in some ritual of confession and humiliation to make up for all the years of privilege. The reader is exposed to reckless drug use and irredeemable boozing, to a daughter...
...Tifft and Jones root the Binghams in Southern traditions, from the mythmaking of genteel poverty to the brute force of the Klan, and sidle up to intriguing questions about the morality of inheriting vast fortunes and the special duties of media owners. But the core story is the mid-1980s sale of all Bingham companies for $448 million by Barry Bingham Sr., then 79. His son and namesake unsurprisingly felt that an adult lifetime of corporate devotion entitled him to the lion's share of control. Two wayward sisters, whom Barry Jr. had disenfranchised, equally unsurprisingly felt entitled to more...
While confirming many rumors, Tifft and Jones debunk the darkest: that Judge Robert Worth Bingham murdered the new wife whose bequest enabled him to buy the papers in 1918. They suggest that she died of alcoholism or tertiary syphilis contracted from a prior spouse. Promised revelations about what finally led Barry Sr. to sell prove anticlimactic: senior aides were ready to move on, making continued family operation unmanageable. What really deserted the Binghams was the faith that a family-owned newspaper is more than a mere capital asset. The book never proves that Bingham ownership was all that good...
ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Richard Behar, Lisa Beyer, Janice Castro, Philip Elmer- DeWitt, Nancy R. Gibbs, Richard Lacayo, Michael D. Lemonick, Thomas McCarroll, Richard N. Ostling, Priscilla Painton, Sue Raffety, Janice C. Simpson, Jill Smolowe, Susan Tifft, Anastasia Toufexis, Richard Zoglin...