New York Timesbestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams withNew York Timesbestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynastyhis mothers family, the Vanderbilts.

One of theWashington Post‘s Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021

When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his fathers small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empiresone in shipping and another in railroadsthat would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money