H.L. and Lyda: Growing Up in the H L Hunt and Lyda Bunker Hunt Family as Told by Their Eldest....

Hill's memoir of her mother, Lyda, and father, oil billionaire H. L. Hunt (1889-1974), written with the Boyars ( World Class ), reads as though it had been transcribed directly from a tape recorder. Despite her stilted prose, her determination to justify H. L.'s rabid anticommunist views and to shine the kindest possible light on his business machinations, Hill's perspective on the building of her father's southwestern oil empire during the 1930s and '40s is of interest. Hill clearly adored her mother, giving her credit for helping to create the family fortune. Although Hill acknowledges that family problems--her father's secret affair with a woman with whom he raised four children; the mental illness of her brother Hassie, upon whom a lobotomy was performed--have caused her considerable distress, she remembers her childhood with fondness and her parents with admiration. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)