By Amanda Smith
Alfred A. Knopf, $37.50 696 pages
A serious biography of Eleanor Medill "Cissy" Patterson was long overdue. During the 1940s, she was part of the "royal family of American journalism." A descandent of abolitionistJoseph Medill, owner of the Chicago Tribune, sister of Joe Medill Patterson of the New York Daily News and cousin to Col. Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, she outshone them all with her flamboyance, grit and intelligence.
As Amanda Smith writes in this handsomely produced door-stopper of a book, the course of Cissy Patterson's early life might have been lifted from the pages of Henry James or Edith Wharton. Beautiful, rich and headstrong, against the objections of her family she married Josef Gizycki, a Polish count with connections to the Austro-Hungarian and Russian courts. Four years later, she had to flee from him, still bleeding from another of his beatings. It took the intercession of President William Howard Taft and Tsar Nicholas II to gain her freedom, along with that of her daughter, whom the count had kidnapped. The melodramatic divorce made the news........
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/30/book-review-newspaper-titan/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
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