#hardcover led with fame, fortune, tragedy, excess, betrayal, and salvation, a powerful glimpse into the life of Picasso and his first family, as told by his granddaughter, reveals his controlling ways and alcoholism that led to the destruction of their family and how she learned to come to terms with the blessings and curses of the#Picasso legacy. 50,000 first printing. Amazon.com Review Pablo Picasso showed a lifelong fascination for monsters, populating countless paintings and drawings with their hideous forms. To judge by his granddaughter Marina's anguished memoir, he might have found their model in the mirror. In this highly impressionistic account, Marina Picasso writes of life with a man who set impassable boundaries "between the inaccessible demigod and us." And with a vengeance: Picasso terrorized his son, Marina's father, who took refuge in downward-spiraling alcoholism, his ambition crushed. "To make a dove," Picasso once wrote, "you must first wring its neck." The grandchildren fared little better; they provided Picasso only with a little local color, just as women provided him with sexual prey, and in the end everyone in her grandfather's life, Marina writes, wound up as a victim, "sacrificed to his art." Many books have portrayed Pablo Picasso unfavorably, but this is the closest we have to a fly-on-the-wall account of the artist in his cruel prime. The picture isn't pretty, but it is captivating. --Gregory McNamee From Publishers Weekly Author Picasso, granddaughter of the richest artist who ever lived, inherited almost a quarter of Picasso's wealth, including 400 paintings of great value. With Valentin, known francophonically for an untranslated biography of French singer Edith Piaf . From Library Journal The granddaughter of Picasso and his first wife, Russian ballerina Olga Kokhlova, has her say