Don't even ask why I read as far as I did. In fact, I haven't (and won't) return to see how he solved the problem he created, because there's nothing about this very bad book that draws me back. I finally put it down on page 699 when the melodrama became so forced I was unable to continue. On the whole, the novel seems rushed and Rutherford uncomfortable writing about a culture with which he is not entirely familiar. The characters are sterotyped and wooden, the history stilted and preachy, and the story filled with more coincidences and inconsistencies than could possibly turn into a good story.

New York, however, set a new low in this kind of broad sweep historical novel. I had enjoyed Rutherford's books, but they never measured up to the best of Michener. Sarum, London, and The Forest were all massive historical novels modeled after the James Michener's works like Hawaii and Centennial, and The Source, all of which followed the lives and fortunes of several contrasting families as they progressed through generations of history in the Hawaii, the American west, and Israel. I had read other works by Rutherford with pleasure. Just before beginning to read Vanderbilt I had been reading Edmund Rutherford's historical novel New York. Stiles' writing is smooth and lucid, opening the people and the culture up to allowing the reader to construct a sense of the times and how they changed over the long life of this first American tycoon. He documents the advantages and difficulties of being the child of such a successful and demanding person, while always keeping Vanderbilt's essential humanity in the forefront. A more difficult problem is trying to make sense of his personal relationship, which Vanderbilt guarded with extreme care. Stiles takes an extremely complicated person who develops into a subtle and complex person and painstakenly follows the ins and outs of his business career.

As I read through this story, I came increasingly to admire the mind and character of Vanderbilt himself.

He emerges as a complex, driving, demanding, principled, and, above all, far-seeing builder of first steam ships lines and then railroads, each of which built and then dominated the America of their eras. This long book about a long and important life only very occasionally looses its narrative drive in the details of deals, wars, betrayals, and successes that characterized Vanderbilt's life.

The book was justly chosen for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in biography and the 2009 National Book Award in non-fiction as well as a number of other distinguished awards. Stiles has crafted a marvelous biography of the man and the era in which he amassed his great fortune. In following the life of Commodore Vanderbilt (an eponymous title), T.J.

The first tycoon cornelius vanderbilt