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 enlarge | Author: David Nasaw
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
Buy New: $7.76
You Save: $12.24 (61%)
New (7) Used (8) from $7.26
Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 614085
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 896
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 2
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.7672092
ASIN: B0015VT2IY
Publication Date: October 30, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Andrew Carnegie January 10, 2007
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
Having read Ron Chernow's Titan and House of Morgan, this was a great companion piece. An all encompassing account of Carnegie's professional and personal life, it has a strong narrative flow, and presents an insightful account of how Carnegie helped to define the nascent industrial age in the United States.
Gripping Tale of a Robber Baron January 9, 2007
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I highly recommend this biography. I often go to Carnegie Hall and make use of the public libraries named after Andrew Carnegie. Having read this book I now know more about the amazing man who gave these institutions, and many others, to the world. The author, David Nasaw, follows the rise of this penniless Scottish immigrant to a position to incredible wealth (the richest man in the world) and influence. He was self-educated and achieved his position through hard work, craftiness, and hard-nosed attitudes in the businesses he tackled: railroads, oil, and steel. When he died he had given away most of his fortune, because he believed that was important. Giving made his feel important. Nasaw has unearthed many fascinating primary sources and footnotes the book well. A great read!
Need to Know January 3, 2007
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
Nasaw has created an interesting and important writing in his Andrew Carnegie book. I appreciate both the style of the writing and the information presented. A winner!
 A Near Complete Life of America's Most Famous Midas January 1, 2007
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
David Nasaw's eagerly anticipated biography of Andrew Carnegie is now available to the reading public and for this we are most grateful. Nasaw, who has previously given us a look at William Randolph Hearst, offers the general reader a fine volume from which to begin further Carnegie studies.
The author had many fine resources available to him and it is clear that some privately held papers and reminisces of the Carnegie family were among them. Nasaw also draws upon earlier biographies, some fawning and others critical, and on the whole presents the reader with a well-balanced perspective of Carnegie the man, as well as Carnegie the businessman. While he draws upon Carnegie's published works as well, the author tells us that he is careful not to include information from Carnegie's (ghost written) Autobiography unless the facts can be corroborated from other sources.
Andrew Carnegie's early years in Scotland are covered well; the views of those who remembered the family at the time of the Burton Hendrick bio, but which Hendrick chose not to include, are part of this work. Also dealt with in great detail is Andrew's ambivalent relationship with his father and his unusually close relationship with his mother Margaret. We also move at the snail's pace that Carnegie adopted through the (to our modern sensibilities) incredibly late and long courtship of his eventual bride Louise Whitfield. Delays and postponements pile up year after year--right down to the actual wedding day--until one begins to wonder why Louise waited so long for her elderly wooer (Carnegie was only two years younger than Louise's father). It must have been love--then again, he was rather a good catch, pragmatically speaking.
The wheelings and dealings that brought Carnegie to prominence in the aggressive world of Pittsburgh industrial intensification are also portrayed in ways that those with only a smattering of understanding of the machinations of capitalism can comprehend. Many of Carnegie's friends and associates are introduced--although some, such as John Leishman who saved H C Frick's life and Robert Pitcairn the president of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, ought to have been presented with greater detail. It would have added immeasurably to the narrative.
One wonders why Nasaw devotes only one hundred words, comprising one small paragraph located on page 367, to the disastrous Johnstown Flood--although he did state correctly, as some biographers have otherwise neglected to disclose, that Andrew Carnegie was indeed a member of the infamous South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club whose failed earthen dam figures at the center of the tragedy. Indeed the citations "Johnstown Flood" and "South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club" do not appear in the book's index--a curious omission.
The Homestead strike, which is more widely remembered today due to the grit of the conflict between labor and management that it entailed, could not of course be glossed over. Nasaw deals with it deftly--although this reader prefers the unvarnished frankness of Martha Sanger's account of the event, offered in her book on her ancestor H. C. Frick.
The many charitable acts of the elderly Carnegie, as well as his attempts to be a world peacemaker, are also recounted in the biography.
One looks in vain however for the famous vitriolic exchange between Frick and Carnegie that occurred late in their lives. Indeed, Frick, who could be described as the failed son that Carnegie never had (even though he would have cringed at the concept), fades from the pages of this biography on page 580. In fact, their remaining years were spent in a bizarre competition, which could have been at least mentioned somewhere between page 581 and the final page, 801. For that, one would need to read the recent, lively and informative book by Les Standiford.
You'll be glad you did!
If you find this review helpful you may wish to read my other reviews of similar works: Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait, Johnstown Flood; Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America, The Miss Stone Affair: America's First Modern Hostage Crisis and the insightful but incomplete After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905.
A good story! December 31, 2006
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I sat down and read this very intersting life story over the past few weeks and thoroughly enjoyed it. Nasaw does a good job of connecting his research and turning it into a nice chronoligical story about the mans life.
During the reading I learned quite a bit about Andrew Carnegie but I was always left wondering if David Nasaw "liked" Andrew Carnegie and if this influenced the facts presented. This had a dampening effect on my thoughts about the author but not on the book as a whole.
Andrew Carnegie was a true leader in our nations history and worth learning about. He laid the ground work for alot of contemporary thinking and influnced several presidential agendas. This is pointed out in the book but could have been expanded on a bit.
I will read another Nasaw biography but will hopefuly find one where he has a bit more respect for the subject.
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