One book going out one book coming in!!
I very much enjoyed underlining and writing notes in the margins as I read this wonderful book The Last Castle. I love history, architecture, literature and art. This book has all that and more! What a fascinating story of an absolutely beautiful building! I dream to visit it someday.
Biltmore Estate is a large (6950.4 acre or 10.86 square miles) private estate and tourist attraction near Asheville, North Carolina. Biltmore House, the main residence, is a Châteauesque-style mansion built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895 and is the largest privately owned house in the United States, at 178,926 square feet:(16,622.8 m) of floor space (135,280 square feet (12,568 m)of living area. Still owned by George Vanderbilt’s descendants, it stands today as one of the most prominent remaining examples of the Gilded Age.
The tenacity of Mrs. Edith Vanderbilt was simply amazing. With such a huge heart and capacity for charity I felt like I was reading about a kindred spirit! The lives of all the Vanderbilts were so very interesting. All their famous literary friends and artist mentioned in the book was just WOW. I would be reading along and see Edith Wharton mentioned and be so excited!
Edith’s The Age of Innocence is a favorite from my teen years! So very many authors and artist whom I admire are mentioned. I can’t fathom being around so much culture. This made reading this book all that more interesting to me. I learned a lot about forestry and how we got to have national forests, as there is a forest on the estate. Women were given more and more rights as the book went along through it’s telling of history, which is a good reminder least we forget that it truly wasn’t all that long ago!
The fact that they were going to go on The Titanic and at the last-minute took another ship made me almost drop the book!
I hope the next person to markup this book enjoys it as much as I did. At the very least I hope they give it a try. Wonderful story, beautifully told in massive detail!
PEACE.
I’m off to read HOME FIRE now.
