The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the...

The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American ... | Charles R. Morris | PRESENT AT THE BIRTH

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The Tycoons: How A...

	The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American ... Charles R. Morris Holt Paperbacks, 2006 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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?Makes a reader feel like a time traveler plopped down among men who were by turns vicious and visionary.??The Christian Science Monitor
The modern American economy was the creation of four men: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet.
Acclaimed author Charles R. Morris vividly brings the men and their times to life. The ruthlessly competitive Carnegie, the imperial Rockefeller, and the provocateur Gould were obsessed with progress, experiment, and speed. They were balanced by Morgan, the gentleman businessman, who fought, instead, for a global trust in American business. Through their antagonism and their verve, they built an industrial behemoth?and a country of middle-class consumers. The Tycoons tells the incredible story of how these four determined men wrenched the economy into the modern age, inventing a nation of full economic participation that could not have been imagined only a few decades earlier.

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Great summary of Economic History

This is a great book for looking at the economic history of the United States. It covers mostly the four mentioned in the title but what was really fantastic and what deserves that extra star is that it covers the economic developments on the side. It looks at how our economy outpace Europe and the shift to make America that extra superpower. WE also have a look at how our ability to move west gave us an added advantage and that we did not have to resort to colonies. While we exported much we still made tremendous gains in internal improvements. He also grasp how the development of the coronation as an institution led to the rise of clerical and accounting positions creating hundreds of service jobs. This book is incredibly well written and really holds your interest. It offered the best explanation of Gould's attempt to corner the gold market I have ever read. It is very well researched and makes references to the top economic historians out there. A must read for anyone who wants to understand how the United States developed economically

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PRESENT AT THE BIRTH

I picked up "The Tycoons" to read, in one place, a chatty summation of recent research about Rockefeller, Gould, Carnegie, and Morgan, but instead found myself pulled through a keyhole onto a vast landscape new to me: how America invented mass-market manufacturing. We were the first country to figure out how to make two rifles so exactly alike that their components could be mixed and matched on the battlefield. The Silicon Valley of this period was the Connecticut River, navigable down to New York with access, via the Erie Canal, to the midwest markets. This river was the site of all the key water-powered factories where early automation and assembly lines created the first mass-produced items for daily life. Besides famous tycoons, we meet the forgotten engineers and efficiency experts who invented modern manufacturing and then spread its gospel to Europe. Through this book you are present at the birth of American economic dynamism. A readable and fascinating survey.

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The Tycoons by Charles Morris

This is a fascinating book, especially for those outside the US who may, like me, be almost wholly unfamiliar with the period of history covered. Morris is excellent at making detail interesting and compulsive to read. The book weaves the lives four very different men into a coherent story. The way in which these "Robber Barons" presage the emerge of Mr Gates (at Microsoft), Mr Brin and Page (at Google) was a very important message for me. This was something I "knew", but could not support, or articulate clearly. Morris has done the job and I am now keen to read his other books.
William Forbes (Bedford, England)

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Nothing new, but a good review of the period

Charles Morris's "The Tycoons" is a good summation of the Industrial Revolution but is almost certainly poorly sub-titled with "How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan Invented the Supereconomy". The New York Times did a review on October 2, 2005 and Todd Buchholtz hit the nail on the head writing "The Tycoons is not a path-breaking work of scholarship, testing new hypotheses against freshly uncovered facts." In fact a good part of Morris's book has nothing to do with these four very important men of commerce influenced anything. Rather he does show what the principal drivers behind such an economic explosion were. His writings on the four are based upon good, but not really extensive, research. For instance, much of his writing on Morgan is attributable to the best seller by Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan. While this was certainly a terrific book, to have it as THE principal souce or one of your main topics, is to short change any serious effort at research.

He manages to get a plug on the book by I.W. Brands of the University of Texas, one of our most well respected historians on the period. Perhaps Professor Brands saw something I did not. That said, it is a quick read and a rather fun one. A bit more organization would have gone a long way.

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Pay Heed to The Reviews

Alas, I should have listened to my fellow Amazoners.

They tried to warn me that despite the misleading title there wasn't very much in this book about the tycoons themselves. Well, I ignored them and blew the full retail price at a local store. If you want to read in minute detail about how a variety of engineering and manufacturing problems which had plagued industry were finally solved by the great minds of the second half of the 19th century, this book is for you. If you want to read about Gould, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Hill, Stanford, and Morgan, check out Matthew Josephson's classic instead. There's very little about any of the tycoons here.

The editors of this book should have insisted on another, more accurate, title.

As for the book itself, it's a pedestrian-like plod through history. Some books you can't put down after picking them up. This is most definitely not one one of them. I find myself taking taking one or two week breaks in between chapters while I devour other books in two consecutive evenings.

If you want to learn about the background in which the robber barons operated this may be the book for you. Just be forewarned that there's scant little about them between the covers.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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