The Astors: A Family Chronicle of Pomp and Power, by Lucy Kavaler (Dodd, Mead, $6.95). Actually, Miss Kavaler has written a biography of the money—how John Jacob Astor (b. 1763) came to this country and accumulated a fortune, how son William and grandson William magnified it, and how the American branch stopped being rich when the childless greatgreat-grandson William Vincent Astor (b. 1891) gave it all away. The British family retains its immense share of the mid-nineteenth-century divvying. It’s a wise plan: a couple of hundred million dollars are interesting even in the hands of the boorish and dull, and concentrating on the money allows us to forget the in-laws and the daughters, and concentrate on the sons who for three generations were the conduits of one of the larger fortunes this world has seen. Along the way Miss Kavaler paints, in bright broad strokes, a fascinating social history of New York 1780-1920, and the dozens of photographs of family, decor, and houses are a valuable running documentary.
W. F. RICKENBACKER
Comments