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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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