Book of The Month: “Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty”, by Anderson Cooper

Editor’s Note: I’m not much for reading about celebrity excess and therefore you may want to skip a few chapters I pushed myself through.  But what made this worth reading for me was a. well-known journalist, Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, the last of the dynasty and b. the Vanderbilt (railroad) fortune which peaked as the USA’s greatest in the late 1800s is now largely exhausted.  More interestingly, the money was spent on private mansions, now gone except for tourist attractions such as Ashville’s Biltmore and Newport’s Breakers.

Read it for yourself here