Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt Audiobook

Quotes

• “A fascinating picture of social and financial struggle in New York a hundred years ago…a truly fascinating book.”

  — Brooke Astor, American author, philanthropist, and socialite

• “Fortune’s Children is a monument to the mesmerizing power of money…The author has been assiduous in combing memoirs, biographies, and private papers and in raiding the social columnists of the period. He has an eye for a memorable quotation.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “A financial fairy tale so bizarre it dwarfs the antics of modern Midases such as Malcolm Forbes and Donald Trump.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “A spellbinding tale of how money really does change everything.”

  — Kansas City Sun

• “Among the author’s earlier books is Changing Law, an award-winning biography of his grandfather, Arthur T. Vanderbilt. His latest history, witty, entertaining, and sad, also merits a prize for the writer, a lawyer and one among many members of the fabled family who inherited the Vanderbilt name but not the wealth…Stories about the author’s ancestors have been told before but not so vividly as in his evocations of the snobbery, ostentation, and profligacy that caused ‘the fall of the House of Vanderbilt.’ Today’s Vanderbilts are not rich-rich; the money is gone with the clan’s grand homes, felled by wrecking balls in New York and elsewhere, leaving only memories of a singular time in the American past.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “In this family history, Vanderbilt dramatizes both the successes and excesses of America’s Gilded Age—the enormous new wealth, the lavish lifestyles, and, later, the desperate schemes to maintain social status and fortune, contesting wills, matchmaking with nobility, and, most notably, battling for custody of ‘Little Gloria.’ But the story is not so much about people as the palaces they built—the Breakers, the Biltmore, and mansions which used to occupy blocks of now-prime Manhattan real estate—all of which became white elephants sold to preservation societies or Towers of Babels that fell under a wave of taxes and upkeep cost. An absorbing social history.”

  — Library Journal