The Season: Inside Palm Beach and America's Richest Society

The tantalizing, and largely borne-out, premise of this dishy expos is that the real-life goings-on in the wealthy resort community of Palm Beach, Fla., are so hedonistically outr as to ""make Dynasty and Dallas look like nursery tales."" Having originally come to the area to research a book on Joseph Kennedy (The Sins of the Father), former Washington Post reporter Kessler found that life in Palm Beach--where 87% of the residents are millionaires, the local grocery store offers valet parking, bank tellers routinely make house calls, and party-goers shell out some $38 million a year to attend the almost-nightly charity balls held during the December-April ""season""--was so ""bizarre"" that the town merited a book of its own. Although one local maintains, ""we have the same problems everyone else does. You just add a few zeroes,"" Kessler's research, conducted during several lengthy stays in Palm Beach, resulted in the hardly surprising but nevertheless titillating conclusion that vast wealth and nearly unlimited leisure time are an often volatile combination. Adultery, plastic surgery and decadent night life all feature prominently here, as do names like Donald Trump, Roxanne Pulitzer and Rod Stewart. But through intimate portraits of some of Palm Beach's less famous residents, Kessler also puts a human face on all the glitz and glamour, revealing that the super-rich can be as painfully insecure, as lonely and even as down-to-earth as the rest of us. While all of that may be nothing new, this is a fun and frothy glimpse into a world that, despite its surface glitter, is, as Kessler astutely observes, characterized by almost as much cliquishness, pettiness and gossip as high school. (Nov.)