Empty Mansions, by Paul Clark Newell and Bill Dedman

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune is one of those books written for a reader like me. A lover of history, curious about the ethics of wealth, and a huge fan of the beautiful city of Santa Barbara, this book weaves them all together.

Best of all, it’s all true. This could easily read as a work of fiction, but it is not.

The focus of the book is Huguette Clark, the heiress of a Gilded Age fortune made in the copper mines of the American West. Her childhood memories included things like JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie coming over for dinner. Wealth of an unimaginable scale was hers, from Stradivarius violins to Impressionist paintings on the walls to safes filled with Tiffany jewelry.

Yet something was amiss for poor Huguette. The owner of three unbelievable homes, one on the bluff overlooking Santa Barbara’s East Beach, Huguette nevertheless chose to spend the last 20 years of her life living in a hospital room. She was in perfect health, but she liked it there. She loved her nurse, mostly trusted the doctors, and gave away millions from her hospital bed. Yet few knew she was even alive, much less so intellectually engaged in the world.

This is a fascinating story. A must read for anybody who loves Santa Barbara, and interesting for anybody who is perpetually bewildered by the human mind and the choices we make. It goes into my top 5 books of the year.