Fortunes Children, Arthur T. Vanderbilt II
Fortunes Children, Arthur T. Vanderbilt II
4 Rating(s)
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Fortune's Children
The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

Author: Arthur T. Vanderbilt II

Narrator: Patrick Lawlor

Unabridged: 9 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/06/2014


Synopsis

Vanderbilt: The very name is synonymous with the Gilded Age. The family patriarch, "the Commodore," built a fortune that made him the world's richest man by 1877. Yet less than fifty years after his death, no Vanderbilt was counted among the world's richest people.

Written by descendant Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children traces the dramatic and amazingly colorful history of this great American family, from the rise of industrialist and philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt to the fall of his progeny—wild spendthrifts whose profligacy bankrupted a vast inheritance.

About Arthur T. Vanderbilt II

Arthur T. Vanderbilt II is an attorney, an award-winning author, and an avid gardener. He practices law in New Jersey and is the author of Golden Days, The Making of a Bestseller, and Gardening in Eden. Changing Law, a biography of his grandfather Arthur T. Vanderbilt, won the American Bar Association's Scribes Award. Arthur lives in northern New Jersey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lois on April 17, 2019

This is very readable, interesting, ironic, funny and page turning. Extreme wealth is wasted on the descendants who don't quite seem to match the family founder, even if they make more money. The founder of the family, Cornelius Vanderbilt the first, was uneducated and from a wealthy enough family th......more

Goodreads review by Hazeanni on August 04, 2022

Finally after almost 2 months, I brought my curtain down on Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt. I took a slow reading on this, to keep track on each of them. They had a tendency to bestow namesakes to their newborns. It was also to make a rounded picture; on how descendants of C......more

Goodreads review by aPriL does feral sometimes on July 25, 2019

If readers want to learn how many of the wealthy choose to live, and learn about what they consider important in life, and what values and ideals that many rich adult children of the wealthy growing up in wealth all of their lives have (hint: none that are readily observable), especially after they......more