Daughter of Spies
Book Feature - Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies by Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop
HBL Note: Any book that gets a blurb from Tim Gunn gets a gold star from me. Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop is the author of over sixty novels ranging in all ages, but this is her first memoir. She explores her childhood as the only daughter, and one of six children, of famed journalist Stewart Alsop and Patricia Barnard Hankey, a decoding agent with MI5. From the glamour of high society to the tight-lipped secrecy born of war-time espionage, this memoir has a little something for everyone. Scroll down to read more (and don’t miss Tim Gunn’s blurb!)
"As a fellow Washingtonian and the offspring of an FBI agent and a CIA librarian, I found that Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop captures perfectly the sinister atmosphere of Cold War Washington. This multilayered memoir takes us on a rich, cinematic journey of great depth and power." —Tim Gunn, author of Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making it Work
Book Feature - Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies by Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop
Book Feature - Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies by Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop
From the publisher:
As a child, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, along with her five brothers, was raised to revere the tribal legends of the Alsop and Roosevelt families. Her parents' marriage, lived in the spotlight of 1950s Washington where the author's father, journalist Stewart Alsop, grew increasingly famous, was not what either of her parents had imagined it would be. Her mother's strict Catholicism and her father's restless ambition collided to create a strangely muted and ominous world, one that mirrored the whispered conversations in the living room as the power brokers of Washington came and went through their side door. Through it all, her mother, trained to keep secrets as a decoding agent with MI5, said very little. In this brave memoir, the author explores who her mother was, why alcohol played such an important role in her mother's life, and why her mother held herself apart from all her children, especially her only daughter. In the author's journey to understand her parents, particularly her mother, she comes to realize that the secrets parents keep are the ones that reverberate most powerfully in the lives of their children.
