Volume 40, Number 12 · June 24, 1993
A Family's Fortune
By Murray Kempton
Undue Influence: The Epic Battle for the Johnson & Johnson Fortune
by David Margolick
Morrow, 624 pp., $23.00
David Margolick's Undue Influence deals with the struggle to dispossess Seward Johnson's widow as heir to the enormous entirety of his estate. It leaves Barbara Piasecka Johnson just where she was when she debarked to a New York pier twenty-two years before: 'completely and utterly alone.' The $200 she had carried here from Poland had, of course, swelled to $240 million in the interim, but that distinction does not seem, on Margolick's telling, to have made much difference. In the fairy tales little girls read, the heroine begins in solitude and ends living happily ever after; in the fairy tales women live, the heroine begins and has a way of ending in solitude.
Review, 1910 words
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