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Ron Chernow

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Paperback – March 30, 2004

by Ron Chernow (Author)

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National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Alexander Hamilton: here is the essential, endlessly engrossing biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—the Jekyll-and-Hyde of American capitalism. In the course of his nearly 98 years, Rockefeller was known as both a rapacious robber baron, whose Standard Oil Company rode roughshod over an industry, and a philanthropist who donated money lavishly to universities and medical centers. He was the terror of his competitors, the bogeyman of reformers, the delight of caricaturists—and an utter enigma.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Rockefeller’s private papers, Chernow reconstructs his subjects’ troubled origins (his father was a swindler and a bigamist) and his single-minded pursuit of wealth. But he also uncovers the profound religiosity that drove him “to give all I could”; his devotion to his father; and the wry sense of humor that made him the country’s most colorful codger. Titan is a magnificent biography—balanced, revelatory, elegantly written.

Print length

832 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

March 30, 2004
Dimensions

6.07 x 1.7 x 9.17 inches
ISBN-10

1400077303
ISBN-13

978-1400077304
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Popular Highlights in this book

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Daring in design, cautious in execution—it was a formula he made his own throughout his career.
1,621 Kindle readers highlighted this
“It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.”
1,515 Kindle readers highlighted this
Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A biography that has many of the best attributes of a novel. . . . Wonderfully fluent and compelling.” —The New York Times

“A triumph of the art of biography. Unflaggingly interesting, it brings John D. Rockefeller Sr. to life through sustained narrative portraiture of the large-scale, nineteenth-century kind.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Important and impressive. . . . Reveals the man behind both the mask and the myth.” —The Wall Street Journal

“One of the great American biographies. . . . [Chernow] writes with rich impartiality. He turns the machinations of Standard Oil . . . into fascinating social history.” —Time

From the Back Cover

John D. Rockefeller, Sr.--history's first billionaire and the patriarch of America's most famous dynasty--is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians. Now Ron Chernow, the National Book Award-winning biographer of the Morgan and Warburg banking families, gives us a history of the mogul "etched with uncommon objectivity and literary grace . . . as detailed, balanced, and psychologically insightful a portrait of the tycoon as we may ever have" (Kirkus Reviews). Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller's exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book will indelibly alter our image of this most enigmatic capitalist.
Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world's richest man by creating America's most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.
Rockefeller was likely the most controversial businessman in our nation's history. Critics charged that his empire was built on unscrupulous tactics: grand-scale collusion with the railroads, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and wholesale bribery of political officials. The titan spent more than thirty years dodging investigations until Teddy Roosevelt and his trustbusters embarked on a marathon crusade to bring Standard Oil to bay.
While providing abundant new evidence of Rockefeller's misdeeds, Chernow discards the stereotype of the cold-blooded monster to sketch an unforgettablyhuman portrait of a quirky, eccentric original. A devout Baptist and temperance advocate, Rockefeller gave money more generously--his chosen philanthropies included the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago, and what is today Rockefeller University--than anyone before him. Titan presents a finely nuanced portrait of a fascinating, complex man, synthesizing his public and private lives and disclosing numerous family scandals, tragedies, and misfortunes that have never before come to light.
John D. Rockefeller's story captures a pivotal moment in American history, documenting the dramatic post-Civil War shift from small business to the rise of giant corporations that irrevocably transformed the nation. With cameos by Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Jay Gould, William Vanderbilt, Ida Tarbell, Andrew Carnegie, Carl Jung, J. Pierpont Morgan, William James, Henry Clay Frick, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers, Titan turns Rockefeller's life into a vivid tapestry of American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is Ron Chernow's signal triumph that he narrates this monumental saga with all the sweep, drama, and insight that this giant subject deserves.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Ron Chernow’s bestselling books include The House of Morgan, winner of the National Book Award; The Warburgs, which won the George S. Eccles Prize; The Death of the Banker; Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Washington: A Life, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; and Alexander Hamilton, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and adapted into the award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton. Chernow has served as president of PEN American Center and has received seven honorary doctoral degrees. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1

The Flimflam Man

In the early 1900s, as Rockefeller vied with Andrew Carnegie for the title of the world's richest man, a spirited rivalry arose between France and Germany, with each claiming to be Rockefeller's ancestral land. Assorted genealogists stood ready, for a sizable fee, to manufacture a splendid royal lineage for the oilman. "I have no desire to trace myself back to the nobility," he said honestly. "I am satisfied with my good old American stock." The most ambitious search for Rockefeller's roots traced them back to a ninth-century French family, the Roquefeuilles, who supposedly inhabited a Languedoc château-a charming story that unfortunately has been refuted by recent findings. In contrast, the Rockefellers' German lineage has been clearly established in the Rhine valley dating back to at least the early 1600s.

Around 1723, Johann Peter Rockefeller, a miller, gathered up his wife and five children, set sail for Philadelphia, and settled on a farm in Somerville and then Amwell, New Jersey, where he evidently flourished and acquired large landholdings. More than a decade later, his cousin Diell Rockefeller left southwest Germany and moved to Germantown, New York. Diell's granddaughter Christina married her distant relative William, one of Johann's grandsons. (Never particularly sentimental about his European forebears, John D. Rockefeller did erect a monument to the patriarch, Johann Peter, at his burial site in Flemington, New Jersey.) The marriage of William and Christina produced a son named Godfrey Rockefeller, who was the grandfather of the oil titan and a most unlikely progenitor of the clan. In 1806, Godfrey married Lucy Avery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, despite the grave qualms of her family.

Establishing a pattern that would be replicated by Rockefeller's own mother, Lucy had, in her family's disparaging view, married down. Her ancestors had emigrated from Devon, England, to Salem, Massachusetts, around 1630, forming part of the Puritan tide. As they became settled and gentrified, the versatile Averys spawned ministers, soldiers, civic leaders, explorers, and traders, not to mention a bold clutch of Indian fighters. During the American Revolution, eleven Averys perished gloriously in the battle of Groton. While the Rockefellers' "noble" roots required some poetic license and liberal embellishment, Lucy could justly claim descent from Edmund Ironside, the English king, who was crowned in 1016.

Godfrey Rockefeller was sadly mismatched with his enterprising wife. He had a stunted, impoverished look and a hangdog air of perpetual defeat. Taller than her husband, a fiery Baptist of commanding presence, Lucy was rawboned and confident, with a vigorous step and alert blue eyes. A former schoolteacher, she was better educated than Godfrey. Even John D., never given to invidious comments about relatives, tactfully conceded, "My grandmother was a brave woman. Her husband was not so brave as she." If Godfrey contributed the Rockefeller coloring-bluish gray eyes, light brown hair-Lucy introduced the rangy frame later notable among the men. Enjoying robust energy and buoyant health, Lucy had ten children, with the third, William Avery Rockefeller, born in Granger, New York, in 1810. While it is easy enough to date the birth of Rockefeller's father, teams of frazzled reporters would one day exhaust themselves trying to establish the date of his death.

As a farmer and businessman, Godfrey enjoyed checkered success, and his aborted business ventures exposed his family to an insecure, peripatetic life. They were forced to move to Granger and Ancram, New York, then to Great Barrington, before doubling back to Livingston, New York. John D. Rockefeller's upbringing would be fertile with cautionary figures of weak men gone astray. Godfrey must have been invoked frequently as a model to be avoided. By all accounts, Grandpa was a jovial, good-natured man but feckless and addicted to drink, producing in Lucy an everlasting hatred of liquor that she must have drummed into her grandson. Grandpa Godfrey was the first to establish in John D.'s mind an enduring equation between bonhomie and lax character, making the latter prefer the society of sober, tight-lipped men in full command of their emotions.

The Rockefeller records offer various scenarios of why Godfrey and Lucy packed their belongings into an overloaded Conestoga wagon and headed west between 1832 and 1834. By one account, the Rockefellers, along with several neighbors, were dispossessed of their land in a heated title dispute with some English investors. Another account has an unscrupulous businessman gulling Godfrey into swapping his farm for allegedly richer turf in Tioga County. (If this claim was in fact made, it proved a cruel hoax.) Some relatives later said that Michigan was Godfrey's real destination but that Lucy vetoed such a drastic relocation, preferring the New England culture of upstate New York to the wilds of Michigan.

Whatever the reason, the Rockefellers reenacted the primordial American rite of setting out in search of fresh opportunity. In the 1830s, many settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut were swarming excitedly into wilderness areas of western New York, a migration that Alexis de Tocqueville described as "a game of chance" pursued for "the emotions it excites, as much as for the gain it procures." The construction of the Erie Canal in the 1820s had lured many settlers to the area. Godfrey and Lucy heaped up their worldly possessions in a canvas-topped prairie schooner, drawn by oxen, and headed toward the sparsely settled territory. For two weeks, they traveled along the dusty Albany-Catskill turnpike, creeping through forests as darkly forbidding as the setting of a Grimms' fairy tale. With much baggage and little passenger space, the Rockefellers had to walk for much of the journey, with Lucy and the children (except William, who did not accompany them) taking turns sitting in the wagon whenever they grew weary. As they finally reached their destination, Richford, New York, the last three and a half miles were especially arduous, and the oxen negotiated the stony, rutted path with difficulty. At the end, they had to lash their exhausted team up a nearly vertical hillside to possess their virgin sixty acres. As family legend has it, Godfrey got out, tramped to the property's peak, inspected the vista, and said mournfully, "This is as close as we shall ever get to Michigan." So, in a memorial to dashed hopes, the spot would forever bear the melancholy name of Michigan Hill.

Even today scarcely more than a crossroads, Richford was then a stagecoach stop in the wooded country southeast of Ithaca and northwest of Binghamton. The area's original inhabitants, the Iroquois, had been chased out after the American Revolution and replaced by revolutionary army veterans. Still an uncouth frontier when the Rockefellers arrived, this backwater had recently attained township status, its village square dating from 1821. Civilization had taken only a tenuous hold. The dense forests on all sides teemed with game-bear, deer, panther, wild turkey, and cottontail rabbit-and people carried flaring torches at night to frighten away the roaming packs of wolves.

By the time that John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839, Richford was acquiring the amenities of a small town. It had some nascent industries-sawmills, gristmills, and a whiskey distillery-plus a schoolhouse and a church. Most inhabitants scratched out a living from hardscrabble farming, yet these newcomers were hopeful and enterprising. Notwithstanding their frontier trappings, they had carried with them the frugal culture of Puritan New England, which John D. Rockefeller would come to exemplify.

The Rockfellers' steep property provided a sweeping panorama of a fertile valley. The vernal slopes were spattered with wildflowers, and chestnuts and berries abounded in the fall. Amid this sylvan beauty, the Rockfellers had to struggle with a spartan life. They occupied a small, plain house, twenty-two feet deep and sixteen feet across, fashioned with hand-hewn beams and timbers. The thin soil was so rocky that it required heroic exertions just to hack a clearing through the underbrush and across thickly forested slopes of pine, hemlock, oak, and maple.

As best we can gauge from a handful of surviving anecdotes, Lucy ably managed both family and farm and never shirked heavy toil. Assisted by a pair of steers, she laid an entire stone wall by herself and had the quick-witted cunning and cool resourcefulness that would reappear in her grandson. John D. delighted in telling how she pounced upon a grain thief in their dark barn one night. Unable to discern the intruder's face, she had the mental composure to snip a piece of fabric from his coat sleeve. When she later spotted the man's frayed coat, she confronted the flabbergasted thief with the missing swatch; having silently made her point, she never pressed charges. One last item about Lucy deserves mention: She had great interest in herbal medicines and home-brewed remedies prepared from a "physic bush" in the backyard. Many years later, her curious grandson sent specimens of this bush to a laboratory to see whether they possessed genuine medicinal value. Perhaps it was from Lucy that he inherited the fascination with medicine that ran through his life, right up to his creation of the world's preeminent medical-research institute.

By the time he was in his twenties, William Avery Rockefeller was already a sworn foe of conventional morality who had opted for a vagabond existence. Even as an adolescent, he disappeared on long trips in midwinter, providing no clues as to his whereabouts. Throughout his life, he expended considerable energy on tricks and schemes to avoid plain hard work. But he possessed such brash charm and rugged good looks-he was nearly six feet tall, with a broad chest, high forehead, and thick auburn beard covering a pugnacious jaw-that people were instantly beguiled by him. This appealing façade, at least for a while, lulled skeptics and disarmed critics. It wasn't surprising that this nomad did not accompany his parents on their westward trek to Richford but instead drifted into the area around 1835 in his own inimitable fashion. When he first appeared in a neighboring hamlet, he quickly impressed the locals with his unorthodox style. Posing as a deaf-mute peddler selling cheap novelties, he kept a small slate with the words "I am deaf and dumb" chalked across it tied by a string to his buttonhole. On this slate, he conversed with the locals and later boasted how he exploited this ruse to flush out all the town secrets. To win the confidence of strangers and soften them up for the hard sell, he toted along a kaleidoscope, inviting people to peer into it. During his long career as a confidence man, Big Bill always risked reprisals from people who might suddenly unmask his deceptions, and he narrowly escaped detection at the home of a Deacon Wells. The deacon and his daughter, a Mrs. Smith, pitied the poor peddler who knocked on their door one Saturday and sheltered him in their home that night. The next morning, when they invited him to church, Big Bill had to resort to some fancy footwork, for he always shied away from crowds where somebody might recognize him and expose his imposture. "Billy told [the deacon] in writing that he liked to go to church, but that his infirmity caused him to be stared at, so that he was abashed and would not go," recalled a townsman. "He really feared that he might be exposed by someone." Seven months later, after the deacon and Big Bill had both moved to Richford, Mrs. Smith spotted the erstwhile deaf-mute at a social gathering and marveled at his miraculous recovery of speech. "I see that you can talk better than when I saw you last," she said. Big Bill smiled, unfazed, his bravado intact. "Yes, I'm somewhat improved." When he arrived in Richford, the local citizens immediately got a taste of his fakery, for he wordlessly flashed a slate with the scribbled query, "Where is the house of Godfrey Rockefeller?"

Since he usually presented false claims about himself and his products, Bill worked a large territory to elude the law. He was roving more than thirty miles northwest of Richford, in the vicinity of Niles and Moravia, when he first met his future wife, Eliza Davison, at her father's farmhouse. With a flair for showmanship and self-promotion, he always wore brocaded vests or other brightly colored duds that must have dazzled a sheltered farm girl like Eliza. Like many itinerant vendors in rural places, he was a smooth-talking purveyor of dreams along with tawdry trinkets, and Eliza responded to this romantic wanderer. She was sufficiently taken in by his deaf-and-dumb humbug that she involuntarily exclaimed in his presence, "I'd marry that man if he were not deaf and dumb." Whatever tacit doubts she might have harbored when she discovered his deceit, she soon succumbed, as did other women, to his mesmerizing charm.

A prudent, straitlaced Baptist of Scotch-Irish descent, deeply attached to his daughter, John Davison must have sensed the world of trouble that awaited Eliza if she got mixed up with Big Bill Rockefeller, and he strongly discouraged the match. In later years, Eliza Rockefeller would seem to be a dried-up, withered spinster, but in late 1836 she was a slim, spirited young woman with flaming red hair and blue eyes. Pious and self-contained, she was the antithesis of Bill and probably found him so hypnotic for just that reason. Who knows what gloom hung around her doorstep that was dispelled by Bill's glib patter? Her mother had died when Eliza was only twelve-she had dropped dead after taking a pill dispensed by a traveling doctor-and Eliza was raised by her older sister, Mary Ann, leaving Eliza deprived of maternal counsel.

On February 18, 1837, despite the express opposition of John Davison, this most improbable couple-Bill was twenty-seven, Eliza twenty-four-were wed at the home of one of Eliza's friends. The marriage was a favorite gossip item among the Richford townspeople, who tended to spy guile on Bill's part. Compared to the Davisons, the Rockefellers were poor country folk, and it is very likely that Bill was entranced by reports of John Davison's modest wealth. As early as 1801, the frugal Davison had acquired 150 acres in Cayuga County. In John D.'s words, "My grandfather was a rich man-that is, for his time he was counted rich. In those days one who had his farm paid for and had a little money beside was counted rich. Four or five or six thousand was counted rich. My grandfather had perhaps three or four times that. He had money to lend."

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 2nd edition (March 30, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 832 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400077303
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400077304
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.26 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.07 x 1.7 x 9.17 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #17,862 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #53 in Economic History (Books)
- #57 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- #116 in Business Professional's Biographies

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Ron Chernow

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Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in 1990 for his first book, The House of Morgan, and his second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the Best Business Book of 1993. His biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Titan, was a national bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

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vessie

The man has great talent and an obvious intellect

Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2018

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Let me begin with the fact that Chernow's composition and writing style are outstanding. The man has great talent and an obvious intellect.

The book begins with a bang and builds to a crescendo- at first. The development of Rockefeller's origins, early life and ascendancy to the worlds richest man, and the captain of American Industry is breathtaking. The detail about his massive and discrete giving are awe inspiring. I couldn't put the book down and burned through the first 300 pages in a few days. Then it happened: Chernow's hatred of Rockefeller's Evangelical Christian world view became too much for him to bear and the book sags into leftist drivel and sanctimony by page +/- 325. It just gets worse from there. It becomes pretentious, and snippy- slouching toward all out hatred for Rockefeller's success springing from the Christian doctrines of self denial, industry, thrift and generosity.

While Chernow treats Rockefeller's Bible Based World View with fairness and thoroughness in the beginning, and attributes Rockefeller's genuineness and success to Rockefeller's Christian convictions, the envy and contempt of the author bleeds through and stains the rest of the book.The reader is treated to constant haranguing and insults directed toward Christianity generally, and Rockefeller's practition thereof specifically.

Rockefeller's life was nothing short of overwhelming. His candor, authenticity, tireless commitment to Abolition, Education, and Temperance all bubble from the wellspring of his Christian convictions. His detractors such as Ida Tarbell and other angry socialists do as much to burnish Rockefeller's reputation as his own good works.

I was taught as a youth to "hate" the "Robber Barrons" (another totally fake Identifier of the original American builder/makers) and dismiss Rockefeller as an evil greedy man. I was lied to! I have a new and great admiration for this authentic and invaluable American hero- thanks to Chernow's book, and my trained critical thinker's discipline to consider the motive of all editorials.

280 people found this helpful

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Grandpa

Too biased for good history

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2019

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Beginning in chapter 8, Chernow ceases to give history and instead begins passing his own judgment on Rockefellers Christianity. Chernow is an outsider to Christianity but that doesn't stop him from acting as an expert on it. He couldn't keep his prejudice to himself and ceased to be a historian.

104 people found this helpful

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Daniel Putman

A journey well worth taking

Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2018

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Though I read and enjoyed Chernow’s biographies of Washington, Hamilton and Grant, I found this biography of Rockefeller his best. I did not expect that. The bland grayish cover, which shows a grim, almost sadistic-looking Rockefeller against a sterile cityscape, does not inspire a potential reader to think of “enjoyable read.” Likewise, the pre-book knowledge I had of Rockefeller’s founding of Standard Oil led me to think that this biography would involve a lot of dry reading about Rockefeller’s financial dealings. But I was completely wrong. This is a gripping story, much of it about an America we now live in but know little about the origins.

Chernow is, as usual, an excellent stylist. The book can roughly be divided into two parts: 1) how Rockefeller got the largest fortune in American history at the time and 2) how Rockefeller gave most of that away in philanthropic work. He drove thousands of small businesses out of the market and put multiple thousands of workers out of work using ruthless and cutthroat techniques, many (not all) of which were legal at the time. Cooperation with him was always better than competition and woe to anyone who did not agree. His personality is fascinating and Chernow does an exceptionally good job at bringing that out. In fact, Rockefeller’s personality and character are central themes that run throughout the book – how this pious Baptist who thought God wanted him to make as much money as possible so he could give it away could go through life with massive repression and apparent equanimity. His (and his son’s) philanthropy is incredible, from founding the University of Chicago to Rockefeller University to the Rockefeller Foundation. Millions for this, multiple millions for that in late 19th century and early 20th century money! It is mind-blowing. The book begins with Rockefeller’s father, a patent medicine quack showman who kept two separate families and ends with Rockefeller giving more money to advance real medicine than any individual in history.

The book expands the reader’s consciousness and is a fascinating and enjoyable read at the same time. Though Chernow’s Hamilton gets all the press these days, I learned more from this book about America and enjoyed it more. In my view it is a pinnacle of biographical writing - by any author.

82 people found this helpful

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Petter Johnson

Rockefeller. A view from the left.

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2019

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I liked the breadth of history and detail. Especially captivating are the descriptions of the strong various characters and events in and around Rockefeller’s orbit from boyhood to manhood. Unfortunately the author’s inappropriate leftist bias and interpretation throughout distracted when it needn’t have - which was often.

35 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Robert ‘Bob’ Macespera

Good

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 21, 2020

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This is a good book in line of the author's other great biographies of great Americans (Hamilton, Morgan, Washington, Grant). Mr Chernow does know well his trade and writes quite well.
However, the books suffers from two reasons, and thus the three stars. Firstly, the most interesting part of a self-made billionaire is how he got to be one. But this is told only suscinctly and in a handful of pages - we see John D Rockefeller as a trader in Ohio and ten pages later he is already an oil tycoon.
Secondly - and this is common in these "great lives" of Mr Chernow - once the main character retires, there's really not much to tell, and we have the sensation of the author's will to produce a large book, just for the sake of it. So we spend two hundred pages reading John Rockefeller's odd habits and routines, playing golf, travelling to Europe and doing all those things the American millionaires do when they retire, and which are not interesting at all. Add to this that his heir, John jr, is a far less interesting character. However, we're told what he likes and does and how many children he had. (This happens too in another good book by the same author, that one about the House of Morgan).
But again, the story is well told (if it could be much better 200 pages shorter). Also on the plus side, it is worth mention that it draws an excellent view on the American change of the Century, from the XIXth to the XXth, obviously, and a very worthy review of the American politics and society of those days.

7 people found this helpful

joshua kumar

Highly recommended

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 14, 2021

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This is the best biography that I have ever read; very interesting to see how Mr Rockefeller transitioned from a simple rural boy into a business leader. Chernow has a very beautiful writing style and portrays Rockerfeller's exploits in the oil industry in a very Machiavellian manor. The book does lose momentum when talking about the life of John D rockerfeller Jr and gives a lot of unnecessary details about senior's retirement routine. Overall a great book and highly recommended for anyone who wants to get started in Business or who wants to study American history

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Amazon Customer

Great read, recommended to all entrepreneurs or successful minded individuals

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 19, 2020

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I’ve always found biographies and autobiographies great reads. To be able to study successful people and emulate elements of their practices into your own life is a great way to build your own standard of wealth.

This book by Ron Chernow is very well written. It is comprehensive and clearly illustrates what sort of person John D Rockefeller was as well as the struggles he had growing up.

We often think that successful people have always had it that way, but this book illustrates the grit that is needed for one to become successful, no matter what their endeavour.

PauloMunich

Much too long and detailed for me

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 8, 2013

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I enjoy reading biographies, but this one is tough going. It's a huge book and goes into minute detail about almost everyone Rockefeller met and every deal he did. The author probably set out to write the "definitive" biography of Rockefeller and he probably succeeded. I've read about a third of it so far and I think I'm going to give up with it. It's probably ideal if you are a historian or writing a thesis on the subject, but for the casual reader of biographies I suggest that you look elsewhere.

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Butler baboo

Wow.

Reviewed in India on October 12, 2017

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Easily the best biography I’ve EVER read, (well apart from Autobiography of a Yogi), Titan is a marvel. Written in a flawless, lucid style, the book describes the life and times of John Rockefeller, the legendary business tycoon of 19th century America.
Described unfairly as a robber baron, Rockefeller amassed a fortune and an empire the world had scarcely seen. Yes, he ruthlessly ripped apart competition; yes he bribed his way to industrial sovereignty. But one must not forget that he was working his way in old frontier America, an America which hardly had any competition or industrial laws. Cowboy capitalism was the name of the game, and Rockefeller was our Clint Eastwood- the strong, silent leader.
Reading this book is an education- one sees the forces of capitalism, law, politics and personalities clash and collide, creating new industries, new wealth and new leaders. Its wonderful. Its addictive.
What stands out in the whole narrative is the man himself- Rockefeller was an enigma. Deeply religious, he often displayed eerie powers of self control and awareness. His rock-solid composure often made me think of the Bhagwan Gita’s idea of samata. Despite one setback after another, this man just pushed on.
Not only do we get to know how he made his empire, but also how he retired at the age of 55 and devoted himself fully to philanthropy and religion. It was Rockefeller who started the University of Chicago and many other educational and medical institutions. What is striking is to see how difficult, how exhausting and nerve wracking even philanthropy proved to be. When you see and read what Rockefeller went through, you often wonder whether accumulating wealth is worth the trouble
Truly a titan. If you’re interested in fascinating men, or even the growth and spread of corporate America interlaced with law and politics, just go for it.

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