Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Stuff America is made of
Comment: The book unfolds the picture of an extraordinary American family, the stuff of which your country is made. Even more than Jack and Connie's participation in the MRA story, it is their background, their kind of patriotism, their love of people that fascinates us as Europeans. I want to thank Florence in particular, for her postscript. What she says about the limitations of the content of truth in the writing of history and biography goes for all of us who had a go at writing. And that we should be slow to judge people we read about and rather be grateful when they share with us what means most to them in their lives. Hope the book will be read by many and that you will soon have to reprint for the next edition.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Elys of Embassy Row
Comment: There is no doubt, as the Preface of MATCHED PAIR suggests, that this well-written biography records "an amazing unfolding adventure". It is the "adventure" of two remarkable New Yorkers, Albert H. "Jack" Ely Jr. and his wife, Constance Jennings. Jack Ely's father, also Jack, a successful doctor and friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, encouraged his oldest son to follow the law, which he did with distinction. Connie's father, Oliver Burr Jennings, joined John D. Rockefeller to become one of the founders of Standard Oil. Connie was also a Manhattan socialite, a skilled horsewoman and a generous worker for good causes such as the New York Hospital.
Connie's sister, Emma, married John D. Auchincloss and their son married Mrs. Janet Bouvier. Subsequently, her daughter, Jacqueline, married John Kennedy and became First Lady. Connie herself married Jack Ely in St. John's Church, New York, on Septemeber 24, 1927.
Jack and Connie might have continued their comfortable, gilt-edged life in New York had they not met an extraordinary man one day early in 1930. His name was Frank Buchman, a dynamic American, who was helping people find a spiritual dimension in their lives and was building a network of such people across the world. They moved to Washington where they eventually purchased a large house that became a meeting place for the movers and shakers in the Capitol and an energy center for Moral Re-Armament, a movement to make the world a better place that Jack and Connie joined and where over the years they made many new friends on several continents.
In Washington Jack kept up his father's relationship with the Roosevelt family who had moved into the White House in 1933. And for a quarter of a century both Jack and Connie devoted themselves to one of the primary aims of MRA, the reconciliation of divergent factions in society.
This work of reconciliation reached its zenith after World War Two. In those post-war years the Elys were at the heart of the reconciliation process both in Japan and in Europe, building bridges among the peoples of Germany, Italy and France. They worked with giants such as Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of Germany, to construct a new Europe on the wreckage of the war and, in the main, they succeeded.
The Elys had four children. Their eldest daughter, Day Ely Ravenscroft, thought afresh about her father's contribution to the post-war healing when she read about others who had contributed to the reconstruction process such as W. Averill Harriman, Dean Acheson, John McCloy, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen and Robert Lovett. She told Jarvis Harriman, the author of this splendid biography, that these men "are my father's peers. They shared his background, his education and his culture. He belongs among them."
Indeed he does and his wife Connie with him. They were truly a matched pair.
