DuPont [also see Du Pont] - Behind the Nylon Curtain [revised & expanded]

Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart Inc, 1984. Hardcover. 968p., illustrated with several photo-insert sections, charts of family's influence and two genealogies. Hardbound in grey boards backed by a red cloth spine lettered silverfoil. Mildest signs of handling, faintest edgewear to jacket, a sound, unsoiled, unclipped copy, not even a former owner name. FYI, this revision adds some 300 pages to its 1974 appearance, and now includes such critical Du Pont strategies as its move from manufacturing into money markets. A good read simply as US history --the family made guns and gunpowder in a big way, they are our Krupps except they're French, the last economic power (truncated) to defend the king (Jacobins drove them out). Their magnificent summer house in Haiti is, well, French-- and that involves conspiracy also. They only own Delaware, but it's manageable and gives them electoral votes. There is about 10p on the proposed coup against Roosevelt, led, in a sting operation, by General Smedley Butler. DuPonts were involved with other big families and interests; if they were not the main instigators then they took the brunt of the scandal, a scandal too big for the citizenry to quite get its mind around.. The book's semi-suppression adds a little spice. About the rare-ification of "Behind the Nylon Curtain," I have gossip from a friend of Colby's; to wit, that the duPonts were not happy knowing they were being researched, and sent someone round to see what Zilg had (I've an unverifiable name for the spy). Direct pressure failed to halt the book and they had to wait til it was published, proceeding then to interfere with the "book-clubbing" of the tome, the only format which would have yielded real venom. They threatened to pull all duPont ads from Time/Life publications; T/L owned the club, duPont is diversified, it would have cost a bundle. Zilg sued the duPonts and Prentice-Hall for conniving to suppress, but the case was assigned to an unfriendly judge. A second printing of this book was undertaken by Lyle Stuart, enlarged to almost a thousand pages. By the time this revision had come out Zilg had dropped his media-liability last name, he now goes by "Gerard Colby." His knockout book about the Rockefellers in South America (and the Wycliff bible-distribution racket that disguised the Rockefeller grab) "Thy Will Be Done. Conquest of the Amazon, Nelson Rockefeller & evangelism in the age of oil" is also Zilgless. (Inventory #: 329693)