In Which Thoroughly Obsessed Thursday Plugs Along on the Non-Fiction Front.

Quick recap for those who don't know: I get all of my non-fiction reading-by-listening done during the four hour round-trip I make about once a week to Scout Camp.  It's served me well; I've gotten a considerable chunk of non-fiction reading done since this whole crazy idea took shape, far more than if I had tried to find the time to actually... well, read.

My focus for the past few weeks (because that's how long these things take) has been The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T. J. Stiles.  I first saw the book in San Francisco (I think), and was extremely excited to give it a try as soon as I finished A. Lincoln.

And when I finally finished it today, I felt... underwhelmed.

This was upsetting, because I had super high hopes.  This book won the National Book Award, after all, and I really wanted something epic (as the title suggests), along the John Adams lines.  In the end, I don't feel like I know Cornelius Vanderbilt any better; I know he was an obscenely wealthy man (adjusted to today's dollars, he's worth over $100 billion), and I know that he made his money in shipping and railroads.

I suppose, ultimately, that I also know that he helped to pave the way west, and that he had an incredibly fractured (yet interesting!) family life.

But I really don't know that much about him.  The book is filled with interesting historical economic facts (perhaps too many, it can be difficult to follow) and cannot emphasize enough the role Vanderbilt had in shaping our modern economy (and it really cannot be overstated... the country would not be the same without him), but the man himself remains elusive.

We know what he did, but not much of why he did it.  And call me a lame-o, but my favorite parts of biographies tend to be the nitty-gritty relationship details, the interpersonal relationships between the subject of the book and the people surrounding him/her.  In this book, I really wish there had been as much about the difficulties Vanderbilt had with his various sons and sons-in-law (and his daughters!), and the intriguing relationship he had with his first wife, Sophia as there was about dividends and railroad monopolies.  Cornelius and Sophia Vanderbilt were married for over fifty years, and yet Sophia only shows up in the text sporadically, mostly as a set-piece in the difficult relationship Vanderbilt had with his son, another Cornelius.

The First Tycoon reads almost like a laundry list of stock shortages, railroad routes, and how to corner the stock market, nineteenth century-style, and I'm way too far removed from an economics classroom to follow the finer points.

I certainly admire the work put in to the book; Stiles did his research and gives plenty of details about the financial and political goings-on at the time.  I only wish he had been able to tell me more about the man he's supposedly writing about.