Vanderbilt

July 15, 2021
The TV anchor and scion of the dynasty examines his family's checkered past. There's an old saying to the effect that the first generation makes the money, the second expands the fortune, and the third squanders it. So it was with the Vanderbilts, with Cooper's mother, Gloria, one of the descendants for whom the fabulous fortune of 19th-century patriarch Cornelius was mostly a distant memory. In a country devoted to anti-royalist principles, he became the nearest thing there was to nobility only a few years after the Revolution. However, notes Cooper, writing with historical novelist Howe, "their empire would last for less than a hundred years before collapsing under its own weight, destroying itself with its own pathology." Some of that pathology was the usual sort: overspending on lavish material possessions; showering money on bad investments and mistresses; and building mighty monuments to self, such as a splendid mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, "nearly three times as big as the White House," that turned out to be a money sink. Cornelius Vanderbilt II had spent the modern equivalent of $200 million to build it in 1895, and less than a century later his descendants would be forced to sell it for a little more than 1% of that figure. Cooper turns up some family secrets, especially their connections to the Confederacy (which explains why there's a Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee), and he explodes the long-held notion that Cornelius Vanderbilt was a wholly self-made man (he borrowed money from his mother to buy his first boat). Suicides, affairs, bad business deals, fierce rivalries, and occasionally an outburst of good sense (as when Billy Vanderbilt doubled his inheritance in just eight years, amassing $230 million) mark these pages along with moments of tragedy, such as the loss of one ancestor in the sinking of the Lusitania. A sturdy family history that also serves as a pointed lesson in how to lose a fortune.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021
"This is the story of the greatest American fortune ever squandered," a dramatic tale expertly told of rapacious ambition, decadent excess, and covert and overt tyranny and trauma. Distinguished CNN anchor Cooper identified with the down-to-earth Mississippian heritage of his father, Wyatt Cooper, only exploring his Vanderbilt side as he and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, collaborated on The Rainbow Comes and Goes (2016). Here he and historian and novelist Howe (The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, 2019) vividly portray key figures, beginning with the first Dutch descendant on Staten Island and the gritty ascent of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who amassed the dynasty's gargantuan wealth, institutionalized his wife when he was weary of her, and drove his namesake son to suicide. With resplendent detail, the authors capture the gasp-eliciting extravagance of the Vanderbilt Gilded Age mansions and lifestyles, which rarely made them happy. As most people struggled to survive, New York's elite Four Hundred goaded "brilliant, witty, cunning, and utterly ruthless" socialite and future suffragist Alva Vanderbilt, who married, then daringly divorced Cornelius' grandson and heir, to maniacal heights of social competitiveness. The authors track the pitfalls of twentieth-century celebrity as the Vanderbilts coped with a dwindling fortune, until resilient Gloria became the last to truly experience "a Vanderbilt life." With its intrinsic empathy and in-depth profiles of women, this is a distinctly intimate, insightful, and engrossing chronicle of an archetypal, self-consuming American dynasty.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Cooper's magnetism, Howe's fan base, and an irresistible subject add up to a nonfiction blockbuster.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 13, 2021
CNN anchor Cooper (The Rainbow Comes and Goes) and novelist Howe (The Daughters of Temperance Hobbes) tell the story of “the greatest American fortune ever squandered” in this juicy portrait of Cooper’s forebears, the Vanderbilts. Tracing the family’s American origins to a Dutch indentured servant who arrived in New Amsterdam (present-day New York City) in 1650, the authors showcase the Vanderbilts as a study in “our country’s mythos,” the belief that anyone can become wealthy if “they have enough gumption, have enough grit, or ruthlessness.” In the 19th century, 18-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt made money ferrying supplies to the British military during the war of 1812, and went on to build railroads, leaving behind a $100 million inheritance to his son William, who was the only Vanderbilt to ever add to the family fortune. William’s daughter-in-law, Alva, transformed from a society doyenne to a key leader of the women’s suffrage movement, while her son, Harold, became a champion yachtsman. In the book’s most moving section, Cooper recounts his mother Gloria’s traumatic childhood, which involved a “sort-of-kidnapping” and a drawn-out custody battle, and her out-of-control spending and dysfunctional relationships as an adult. Marked by meticulous research and deep emotional insight, this is a memorable chronicle of American royalty.