Beyond His Control (Memoir of a Disobedient Daughter)

Book excerpt: On March 25, 1969 Linda Hale Bucklin learned her vivacious mother was dead, her right temple blown out by a bullet from her father's pistol. Was it suicide or homicide? Standing up to her father, heir to the Broadway/Hale Department Store fortune, Linda is disinherited, then ostracized from the family she loves. When her father marries his mistress, Denise Minnelli, stepmother to Liza Minnelli, the family unravels. Once a child of privilege, Linda recounts, in vivid detail, her extraordinary life—summers on the family's 10,000 acre ranch in Northern California, hunting trips to Africa and Alaska, high society vignettes of a fourth-generation San Francisco family, and her father's final decision: to leave the entire family fortune to Minnelli. But amid the ashes, Linda finds a new strength: the strength to forgive the one who started it all. REVIEWS: "...a jolting memoir." ~The New York Post "...a book you won't be able to put down." ~David Patrick Columbia, New York Social Diary