The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke

Reading Level
Grade 9
Time to Read
6 hrs 41 mins

Reading Level

What is the reading level of The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke?

Analysing the books in the series, we estimate that the reading level of The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke is 8th and 9th grade.

Expert Readability Tests for
The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke

Readability Test Reading Level
Flesch Kincaid Scale Grade 8
SMOG Index Grade 11
Coleman Liau Index Grade 9
Dale Chall Readability Score Grade 6

Reading Time

6 hrs 41 mins

How long to read The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke?

The estimated word count of The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke is 100,130 words.

A person reading at the average speed of 250 words/min, will finish the book in 6 hrs 41 mins. At a slower speed of 150 words/min, they will finish it in 11 hrs 8 mins. At a faster speed of 450 words/min, they will finish it in 3 hrs 43 mins.

The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke - 100,130 words
Reading Speed Time to Read
Slow 150 words/min 11 hrs 8 mins
Average 250 words/min 6 hrs 41 mins
Fast 450 words/min 3 hrs 43 mins
The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke by Sallie Bingham
Authors
Sallie Bingham

More about The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke

100,130 words

Word Count

for The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke

336 pages

Pages
Hardcover: 336 pages
Paperback: 352 pages

10 hours and 46 minutes

Audiobook length


Description

"Men who inherit great wealth are respected, but women who do the same are ridiculed. In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham rescues Doris Duke from this gendered prison and shows us just how brave, rebellious, and creative this unique woman really was, and how her generosity benefits us to this day.” ―Gloria Steinem A bold portrait of Doris Duke, the defiant and notorious tobacco heiress who was perhaps the greatest modern woman philanthropistIn The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham chronicles one of the great underexplored lives of the twentieth century and the very archetype of the modern woman. “Don’t touch that girl, she’ll burn your fingers,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once said about Doris Duke, the inheritor of James Buchanan Duke’s billion-dollar tobacco fortune. During her lifetime, she would be blamed for scorching many, including her mother and various ex-lovers. She established her first foundation when she was twenty-one; cultivated friendships with the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson; flaunted interracial relationships; and adopted a thirty-two year-old woman she believed to be the reincarnation of her deceased daughter. This is also the story of the great houses she inhabited, including the classically proportioned limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, the sprawling Duke Farms in New Jersey, the Gilded Age mansion Rough Point in Newport, Shangri La in Honolulu, and Falcon’s Lair overlooking Beverly Hills. Even though Duke was the subject of constant scrutiny, little beyond the tabloid accounts of her behavior has been publicly known. In 2012, when eight hundred linear feet of her personal papers were made available, Sallie Bingham set out to probe her identity. She found an alluring woman whose life was forged in the Jazz Age, who was not only an early war correspondent but also an environmentalist, a surfer, a collector of Islamic art, a savvy businesswoman who tripled her father’s fortune, and a major philanthropist with wide-ranging passions from dance to historic preservation to human rights. In The Silver Swan, Bingham is especially interested in dissecting the stereotypes that have defined Duke’s story while also confronting the disturbing questions that cleave to her legacy.