The very rich are not like you and me. They are duller. So Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe demonstrate in Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, their engaging and, indeed, suspenseful study of Cooper’s gilded relations. Which of these American Trimalchios will prove the most vacuous?
Cornelius Vanderbilt, the family’s founder, born on Staten Island in 1794, was boorish even by the standard of tycoons, but preternaturally clever. “Never tell nobody what yer goin’ to do till you do it,” he would say—as useful a piece of advice as any in Machiavelli.
