New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper
teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine
Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty--his
mother's family, the Vanderbilts.
One of the Washington Post's Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021
When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father's
small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would,
through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money,
build two empires--one in shipping and another in railroads--that would
make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought
over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that
would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by
"the Commodore," subsequent generations competed to find new and ever
more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018, when the last
Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers--the seventy-room summer
estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that Cornelius's grandson and namesake
had built--the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who
started it all.
Now, the Commodore's great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins
with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary
family and their outsized influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into
the ancestors who built the family's empire, basked in the Commodore's
wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered
American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble
wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth
Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts of
Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and Howe wryly
recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any
other.
Written with a unique insider's viewpoint, this is a rollicking,
quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so
vividly captures.
