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Rating: 
Summary: Great Story and Beautiful Prose
Review: 'How I Came Into My Inheritance' is both a quite sad and a quite funny biography. It explores the author's life by frequent reminiscence to the lives of the author's parents generation and her extended family. The prose is excellent and delightful to the reader. Ms. Gallagher chronicles her immigrant extended family and thus tells the story of that particular generation of early 20th century East European Jewish immigrants. The family dynamics are amazingly familiar: both extremely funny but also very sad. The grudges, the socialist ideas, the summer camps, the obsessive-compulsive relationships, it could have been written by my parents or any of my friend's parents who were all born in the Lower Eastside to Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Unfortunately, and I guess that's why I still find the story quite sad, is that Ms. Gallagher never really seemed to be able overcome the issues and deal in a positive way with the eccentricities of her parents and her relatives while they were alive.
Rating: 
Summary: Parents and Politics in Perfect Prose
Review: Dorothy Gallagher applies dry-eyed wit and candor not only to her fiercely difficult parents and their numerous associates but also to herself, which makes "How I Came Into My Inheritance" a lesson in revelation. What sets this book far above the usual memoir is the author's abiltity to tell a story, her instinct for the telling detail, the killing choice of a word. She knows how to write, and the reader cannot resist her. While she is exceptionally good (and funny!) at illustrating the politics that defined her childhood (she would have been surprised to learn that all children didn't go to socialist summer camp), Gallagher is mesmerizing when she writes about her parents aging. She captures the exquisite heartbreak and confusion both for child and parent, and she does it with no sentimentality whatsoever. In this age of the lazy, glossy-mag confessionals, Gallagher's book is a triumph of sophisticated observation and highly skilled prose. It will raise your standards for anecdote, memoir and family history.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent and different
Review: I've read any number of books -- memoirs and novels -- about women growing up in the late thirties/early forties in New York City, with immigrant parents involved in Communism. This was among the best -- clever, ironic, touching, laugh-out-loud funny. Only complaint: too short. I wanted to know more and more about Dorothy Gallagher and her family.
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