Astor
The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune
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3.9 • 282 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A NPR Best Book of the Year
The number one New York Times bestselling authors of Vanderbilt return 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, featuring black-and-white and color photographs, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe chronicle the lives of the Astors and explore what the Astor name has come to mean in America—offering a window onto the making of America itself.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Explore the extravagance and ruthlessness of the family whose name once personified class in America. Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe’s brilliant biography charts how penniless immigrant John Jacob Astor’s ambition made him America’s richest man and how his wealth established his family’s influence not only during the Gilded Age but for generations afterward. We really enjoyed reading about these larger-than-life characters and their petty rivalries and getting into the unflattering nitty-gritty of how the Astors made their millions. Detailed, clear-eyed, and often wryly funny, this tale of success and excess is a great read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
CNN journalist Cooper and novelist Howe follow up Vanderbilt with an exhaustive history of the Astor family. After a failed attempt in the 1810s to open a new trading outpost in the Pacific Northwest, by the 1830s John Jacob Astor had grown the American Fur Company into one of the country's largest business concerns, mainly by profiting off trade to Indigenous people in the American territories along the Mississippi and Canadian border, undercutting government trading posts and pushing alcohol sales. He later turned to real estate development in New York City. Subsequent generations had a long downward spiral, starting with John Jacob Astor IV's death on the Titanic in 1912. The book ends by detailing the elder abuse case surrounding Brooke Astor, widow of Vincent Astor, a scandal that played out in the tabloids in the mid-2000s after her son by a previous marriage was accused of mistreating and exploiting her. This meticulously detailed family saga is also rich with insight into U.S. history, including revealing chapters on topics ranging from mid-19th-century populist sentiments concerning Shakespeare (the Astor Opera House staged a performance of Macbeth that was widely reviled for its high ticket price) and the early 20th-century gay scene (when the Astor Hotel became a queer rendezvous spot). History buffs and readers fascinated by the rich and famous should take note.
Customer Reviews
Enjoyed
I’ve always had a baffling fascination with the gilded age and American history. I learned a lot about the Astors that I did not know.
Extraneous Padding
Too much extraneous material: the Titanic movies, the gay night scene in NYC, the actress Lucile Langhanke. And the author can’t resist slipping in an f word.
Must read for NYC history buffs.
Enjoyable read, generally about growth of wealth by early immigrants to NYC and the USA, specifically the Astor family. Makes me want to read more by Cooper. Bravo!