Vanderbilt: Anderson Cooper

The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty | Paperback When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father’s small ferry boat in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was contested by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by “the Commodore,” subsequent generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it.