by Anita Leslie. Henry Holt & Co. 312 pp. $4.

Leonard Jerome was a personable and talented man from upstate New York who set out to be a lawyer, served for a time as a publisher, and then went to Manhattan to enter the lists in Wall Street, which he did with such marked success that he became very wealthy and emerged as one of the city’s more prominent yachtsmen, horsemen, bon vivants and men-about-town. His claim to fame now is that his daughter, Jennie, one of the numerous American heiresses of the post-Civil War era to attract the regard of bachelor sprigs of European nobility, made a marriage which was both happy and historically important. She became the wife of Randolph Churchill, younger son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, and bore a son who was to become world-famous in our own generation as Winston Churchill. Jerome himself appears to have been a moderately interesting man, and the story is entertainingly told.