The author is a celebrated trial attorney for the rich and famous (and infamous) who knows his way around the gossip columns almost as well as he knows courthouse corridors. Here’s the surprise: he can write, and not just well but affectingly, about his days growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, as the son of a poor but good-hearted grocery-store owner. His adventures rival any you might find in a coming-of-age novel, including multiple expulsions from school (in one incident, he tries to urinate on a fellow student from a third-floor window but splashes a teacher instead) and a longtime romance with a wealthy girl whose death many decades later from Parkinson’s helped spark the idea for this memoir. Married for several years to Marisa Berenson, he helped raise his stepdaughter and then had his own son, Darrow, by surrogacy in 2007. Darrow, now in his late teens, is his best friend, and if Aaron Richard Golub has ensured that his son never endures what he did, he at least makes clear that, at the age of 80, he is the happiest he has ever been.
Fans of House of Trelawney (and there are quite a few, including us) will devour this sequel, which focuses on Ayesha, the illegitimate daughter in the British aristocratic-but-broke Trelawney clan, who acquires the family castle when her husband buys it for her as a wedding present. Not the best way to get along with your erstwhile relatives, and then Ayesha is jettisoned by her husband, who falls in love with, yes, a crypto-currency con artist. Ayesha, thank God and King, prevails in the end, but not before there are enough plot twists to outdo a New York pretzel. And High Time is more delicious.
There are two kinds of people: those who think the soaring apartment spires now blighting the skyscape south of New York’s Central Park are the ugliest things in the world, and those who think they are the ugliest things in the universe. Oh, wait, there is a third kind: those who developed, sold, and bought these apartments. Katherine Clarke, who covers the high-end real-estate market for The Wall Street Journal, has written a rollicking account of how what is dubbed “Billionaires’ Row” came to be. The Wild West has nothing on the cowboy builders, bankers, and buyers who populate Clarke’s tale, and the only hero who emerges from this saga is Clarke herself, for producing a narrative far more engrossing than what the eye beholds looking at Billionaires’ Row.
Ruckus, High Time, and Billionaires’ Row are available at your local independent bookstore, on Bookshop, and on Amazon
