|
Golden Days: Memories of a Golden Retriever The Making of a Bestseller: From Author to Reader
|
The Breakers, Newport, Rhode Island
Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt is the story of the family of Commodore Vanderbilt, a robber baron who made a fortune in steamships and railroads. The Commodore died in 1877, the world's richest man. What happened thereafter to the richest family in the work is a remarkable story of money, glamour, and scandal. That peculiarly American dream of rags to riches became for the Commodore's descendants a peculiar nightmare as they discovered what they could do with the money and what the money could do to them. At the heart of this story of the decadence and decline of the nation's most conspicuous family of millionaires is a cast of characters as glittering and outsized as the opoulent era of their Gilded Age:
This dazzling story of greed, revenge, ruthlessness, and tragedy is full of scenes that will not soon be forgoten: the elderly Commodore on his deathbed, still cursing and swearing at his ten children, who hover like vultures waiting for him to die, yet are still so frightened of the old man that they dare only peep in at him from the safety of the hallway; the glittering fancy dress ball in the Vanderbilts' new fairy-tale palace on Fifth Avenue; Alva threatening to shoot her daughter's fiance and then feigning a heart attack; Consuelo's coerced wedding at St. Thomas's to the ninth duke of Marlborough; Neily Vanderbilt striking his father, who has forbidden him to marry the woman he loves, and who will disinherit him when he does; the scandalous custody trial for ten-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt, pitting her globe-trotting mother against her fabulously wealthy Aunt Gertrude; pathetic Grace Vanderbilt, still trying to live the life of the Queen of Society on the remnants of a fortune that had long begore been squandered; ninety-year-old Florence Vanderbilt Twombly, the Commorodore's last surviving granddaughter, living alone in frosty splendor in her 110-room manor, looked after by 100 servants. Set against a backdrop of monumental Fifth Avenue mansions, sprawling country estates including the Breakers and Biltmore, oceangoing yachts, private railroad cars, fleets of maroon Rolls-Royces, lavish jewelry, and squads of maroon-liveried servants, this is a riveting account of a bygone world of privilege, money, power, and self-indulgence. It is a compellling, irresistible narrative of the fall of a family of dynasty, and an inside look at American capitalism. John Kenneth Galbraith: "The Vanderbilts over several generations united two notable talents, these being for the acquisition of money and later the dispensing of it in unparalleled volume, and for frequent and unparalleled self-gratification and, very often, rather forthright stupidity. This is a superior account of both qualities and especially the second." William E. Simon: "Americans have long been enthralled by the Vanderbilt family, which seems to have been at once so blessed and so cursed. The dichotomy is thoughtfully explored in Fortune's Chidlren, a book which is every bit as intriguing as its subject warrants."
|
||||||||||||||
