A warts and more warts portrait of a brilliantly successful, genuinely despicable man.
A remarkably unflattering life of the 19th-century transportation magnate who amassed the largest private fortune in American history.
“Distant,” “quarrelsome,” “forbidding,” “parsimonious,” “vindictive,” “ravenous,” “braggart,” “boor”—these are some of the words Renehan uses to describe Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose business cunning kept him always a step ahead of the competition in sailboats, steamships and railroads. Oblivious to any concept of the public good, uninterested in anything remotely cultural, devoid of generosity, he appears to have committed only two charitable acts—purchasing a church and endowing what became Vanderbilt University, both at the behest of his second wife. He briefly banished his first wife to an insane asylum for her refusal to move with him from Staten Island to Greenwich Village. He disdained his dozen children. Indeed, he appears to have had no interior life whatsoever, finding amusement only in drinking, horseracing and whore-chasing. His too-public, late-life liaison with Tennie Claflin, sister of the notorious clairvoyant/spiritualist/prostitute Victoria Woodhull, prompted the family to engineer a “face-saving” marriage to a woman 44 years his junior. Meanwhile, the Commodore finished out his days sporadically demented from syphilis. Renehan (Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons, 2005, etc.) convincingly presents Vanderbilt as the prototype of the purely economic man, a real-life Ebenezer Scrooge unclaimed by any cult of idealism and driven purely by profit. Renehan meticulously tracks all the brilliant, often shady business transactions—he’s especially good on Vanderbilt’s controversial role at the heart of Gibbons v. Ogden, the famous Supreme Court case establishing the supremacy of the Commerce Clause—that placed the Commodore at the top of the economic heap. In a public letter to partners he felt had cheated him, Vanderbilt wrote, “I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.” And then he did exactly that.
A warts and more warts portrait of a brilliantly successful, genuinely despicable man.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-465-00255-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
