More significantly, Nica dedicated herself to promoting Thelonious Monk, years before more traditional jazz lovers fully embraced his singular music. The sisters seldom stepped out of the limelight: Miriam as a pioneer of “rewilding” and an expert on fleas and Nica (as Pannonica was known) as a drug-taking “jazz baroness” of New York, in whose hotel suite Charlie Parker died. Miriam and her sister Pannonica (named by their butterfly-hunting father, Charles, after a rare moth) are just two of more than a dozen female members of the Rothschild family whose lives are recounted in Livingstone’s book. In 1969, Miriam Rothschild, a renowned British zoologist, discovered that she and her brother, Victor, who was also a zoologist, were the only members of their celebrated banking family included in the country’s latest edition of “Who’s Who.” Delighted, Miriam confessed to an aunt that “to have edged the partners out of the limelight is a moment of great malicious pleasure to me.” It’s a moment that also gives evident pleasure to Natalie Livingstone, the author of “The Women of Rothschild,” a commendable if curiously titled book on a splendid subject. THE WOMEN OF ROTHSCHILD: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty, by Natalie Livingstone
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