Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a dreadful biography of a dreadful but fascinating family. I give it one star because the author is able to put one word in front of the other and walk us through her story, but more often she stumbles on her own muddled thinking. I suppose I could get past the "Town & Country" prose, and the obsessive geneological boredom of rich and titled cousins who are of no consequence other than to pour on the peerage, but the author, Mary S. Lovell, turns a blind eye to the horrors of fascism which two and one half of that wild and crazy Mitford family followed, and that is hard to digest. The crimes of fascism were already evident when the sisters and brother Tom came of age. Ms. Lovell may not want to recognize it but the fascists in Germany and in Italy were aleady beating people and murdereding the innocent. They were the enemies of the very civilization which the Mitford's enjoyed so frivolously. By refusing to judge her subjects, the author passes judgment on herself, as an apologist for the British fascist views of that time, and the comfortabe reactionary beliefs of the Mitford class. The author's attempts to justify those Mitford sisters and brother Tom who were attracted by fascism are disingenuous. We are never prepared psychologically to understand Diana's infatuation with Oswald Mosely, the British Fascist, nothing in the book prepares us for this "great love story," between the gorgeous Diana and the hateful, rabble rousing jack booted Mosely. Despite the author's incredible claim that Diana's imprisonment by the British authorities during the war was worse than a German concentration camp, Diana was living at the Ritz compared to the Jews in the camps, those she and her dear husband would have had exterminated. Beautiful Diana was either dim witted or deluded, or both. The claim that all their fascism was an effort to fight Stalin's communism is bogus. All the sisters had courage, but in them it is less a virtue than a matter of believing that they own the world and can do anything in it, so they will. Jessica, awash in doctrinaire socialism, and naive when it came to communism, comes off best as a human being capable of compassion, but no thanks to the author who regards her with a jaundiced eye. Jessica (or Decca) had a strong sense of social justice and produced excellent books and lived a productive life as a muckraking journalist. She alone does not seem to have been deluded by the family myths that witty sister Nancy created in her charming novels. The author clearly has less tolerance for Jessica,she devotes pages of disapproval to her, imagine, she ran away with a Socialist Society boy - tut tut tut - a black sheep cousin of Churchill - and thereby caused her family such pain and embarassament. She is the object of the author's primary disapproval, as oppossed to the deluded Diana or Unity. Jessica, or Decca as she is called her, committed the unpardonable crim of concern for unwashed humanity. The beautiful fascist Diana, and the spunky Hitler worshipping Unity, who were prepared to turn their country and the world over to Hitler, come off as dear little madcaps. Nancy,who had a natural sense of decency, was the wittiest and most charming of all the sisters, as evidenced in her delightful novels, but despite her personal qualities, she remains a minor figure in literature, no matter how one tries to puff up her reputation with PBS miniseries. She is not even a close runner up to her good friend Evelyn Waugh. He was a self satisfied bigot, a reactionary snob, but nevertheless a great writer. This biographer does not see that the roots of this family's ideological disease were planted by the ever so adorable and eccentric "farve" - the father who hated all foreigners, and Sydney, the mother whose cozy country house snobbery made her children feel that they deserved all the goodies that life offered. Fascism must have seemed one fine way to protect their privilaged lives during the Great Depression, or if you prefer, my subtitle for this book,"High Life In The Big Slump." The author would have us regard her subjects beliefs as a form of British upper class eccentricity, rather than what it was; callous, vicious, and heartless; a lack of empathy for others that grows tiresome. For most of the Mitfords it was more fun to shock the middle class than to think through their beliefs and actions, and honestly examine the world they lived in. No, they were not responsible for Hitler, but they were part of the environment, like the Cliveden House set and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that helped make the death camps possible, either through indifference,ignorance, or loathing for those who "are not out kind". When you cannot trust the author's point of view, or lack thereof, or her sense of history, how can you trust anything about her book? I felt a bit like Papa Mitford, wanting to banish the book by flinging it into the ancestral fireplace and shouting, "Sewer!". It is unusual these days to read such slavishly uncritical work, a product of the author identifying too closely with her subjects and attempting to justify their lives, without really coming to understand them, their strengths and their great weaknesses, and placing them in some kind of social and psychological context. Ms. Lovell is so determined to be fair to her subjects that she is unfair to her readers and to history. A poor historian, a good gossip, and a disgraceful thinker. Reader, pass this one by.