Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune Hardcover – September 19, 2023

I really enjoyed this from beginning to end. Well done.

Really enjoyed the book. I felt though that too much time was spent on discussing the Astor Bar as a meeting place for gay men in the 40's and 50's. A couple of pages at most would do. Otherwise I learned a lot about the amassing of the fortune, its dwindling, the personalities involved and effect on American history.

The title piqued my curiosity. It was slow going but as I learned more about this family I found this very interesting and it was a entertaining read. Anderson and Katherine did a good job in putting this all together and the research factor had to be quite challenging.

I am a fan of Anderson Cooper and his writing, and I have enjoyed everything else he has written. I have read many books on The Astor Family, and various members of it, and was really looking forward to this book. Maybe I just had too high expectations from Cooper's previous books.First I feel that Cooper is holding a personal vendetta against the Astor family. He makes it quite clear when discussing Brooke Astor's (apparent) snubbing of him when he was not with his mother at Mortimer's. As a seasoned journalist I would think Cooper wouldn't be so biased, but its all over the book. Clearly in Cooper's eyes the Vanderbilts were better than the Astors. I am sure (and I hope) that IRL Cooper doesn't still hold this apparent grudge against a family, but by reading the book you would think we were back in The Gilded Age and Anderson was not invited to Mrs. Astor's balls.My larger issue is that a book that for me should have been like reading my favorite type of candy this book was very dull at points. There are countless pages about things that I feel could have been explained in one or two pages (such as the massacre at the Astor House). I was shocked to find some parts of this book tedious for me to get through.If you don't know much about the Astor Family this does give you a full picture of the family origins and how they got where they got to, but I'd probably recommend something a little less biased.I am not sorry I got this book. It's a great package, and the authors are quite talented. It just wasn't what I was expecting. Still will buy future books by Cooper in the hopes they keep me as interested as his prior works.

Truly money isn’t everything. An enlightening insight into wealth. I often wondered why I never heard anything about the Astors. I learned money kills. Truly enlightening about New York City politics and how money never makes happiness.

While I have read a lot of books about wealth history in the US, the Astor family was a story I knew very little about. Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe have written a book that is a worthy companion to their book about the Vanderbilt family (of which Cooper is a descendant). They were one of the wealthiest families in the country for over 200 years, but they were also one that we know less about than the more opulent Vanderbilt family. Their wealth, though just as substantial was older and more subdued, which explains why they are more historically obscure.I thought Astor was more skillfully written than Cooper and Howe’s Vanderbilt book. But I did feel that there were three chapters toward the end that weren’t really about the family, and I wasn’t convinced they belonged in this book.Despite that distraction, I still enjoyed this book.

The entire story is set before us - the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s a fascinating, yet often brutal tale of rags to riches to rags again. In the style of famous biographies like those of Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin, little is left to the imagination. Even the smallest details are shared in an attempt to get a closer look at the rich and famous that helped build New York City.

I just finished reading Astor and absolutely loved it. The structure of the book, with details no one would ever guess about this famous family and their legacy, is captivating.So well researched, I was enthralled.The original John Jacob Astor was actually a horrible man, slaughtering beavers and other animals on his way across the continent after arriving penniless on our shores from Walldorf, Germany. His greed knew no end. While living extravagantly in a posh NYC neighborhood and buying up New York real estate, the tenements in which poor immigrants lived were on land owned by him. Rent was impossibly high and suffering was rampant. But the Astors cared little.Subsequent generations of Astors were eccentric, strange and very greedy.Too much money harbors great resentment on future generations. I have actually seen the effects in people I have known.