Astor; The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

ix, [4], 322, [2] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations (some with color). Astor Family Tree. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Signed by Anderson Cooper on the title page. The dust jacket has minor edge wear and soiling. The history is comprehensive, but Cooper provides color and enthusiasm with every intriguing story. He breathes life into the story of how his great-great-great grandfather, "the Commodore," built enormous wealth through railroad and shipping enterprises. Anderson Cooper's familiar voice and delivery style are ever present in this historical account of the Vanderbilt dynasty. The history is comprehensive, but Cooper provides color and enthusiasm with every intriguing story. He breathes life into the story of how his great-great-great grandfather, "the Commodore," built enormous wealth through railroad and shipping enterprises. Cooper expresses his fascination with how his family's wealth and extravagant spending helped define the Gilded Age in America. In his magnetic style, Cooper keeps listeners engaged with provocative tales portraying the Commodore's rise to high society and the tragic repercussions that occurred as descendants zealously frittered away that empire. Katherine Howe (born 1977) is an American novelist who lives in New England and New York City. She specializes in historical novels which she uses to query ideas about "the contingent nature of reality and belief." Her debut novel was the New York Times Bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009), related to the Salem witch trials. She has also written two non-fiction works with Anderson Cooper. Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator who anchors the CNN news broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360°. In addition to his duties at CNN, for two decades Cooper served as a correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes. After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, he began traveling the world, shooting footage of war-torn regions for Channel One News. Cooper was hired by ABC News as a correspondent in 1995, but he soon took more jobs throughout the network, working for a short time as a co-anchor, reality game show host, and fill-in morning talk show host. In 2001, Cooper joined CNN, where he was given his own show, Anderson Cooper 360°; he has remained the show's host since. He developed a reputation for his on-the-ground reporting of breaking news events, with his coverage of Hurricane Katrina causing his popularity to sharply increase. For his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Cooper received a National Order of Honour and Merit, the highest honor granted by the Haitian government. From September 2011 to May 2013, he also served as the host of his own syndicated television daytime talk show, Anderson Live. Cooper has won 18 Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards, as well as an Edward Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2011. Astor was an NPR Best Book of the Year. The number one New York Times bestselling authors of Vanderbilt returns with another riveting history of a legendary American family, the Astors, and how they built and lavished their fortune. The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story-of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic, one of many shocking and unexpected twists in the family's story. In this unconventional, page-turning historical biography #.…