Location:Home » Caribbean » Bargain Books » Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer
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Avg. Customer Rating:(based on 4 reviews) Sales Rank: 20362 Category: Book
Author:Stephen Dando-collins Publisher:Da Capo Press Studio:Da Capo Press Manufacturer:Da Capo Press Label:Da Capo Press Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published) Media: Hardcover Number Of Items: 1 Pages: 384 Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3 Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4
When he died in 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the Vanderbilt dynasty, was wealthier than the U.S. Treasury. But he had nearly lost his fortune in 1856, when William Walker, a young Nashville genius, set out to conquer Central America and, in the process, take away Vanderbilt?s most profitable shipping business. To win back his empire, Vanderbilt had to win a bloody war involving seven countries.
Tycoon?s War tells the story of an epic imperialist duel?a violent battle of capitalist versus idealist, money versus ambition?and a monumental clash of egos that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans.
Written by a master storyteller, this incredible true story, impeccably researched and never before told in full, is packed with greed, intrigue, and some of the most hair-raising battle scenes ever written.
Customer Reviews:
Vanderbilt's Relentless October 27, 2008 What a study in power and greed. Wow, would the US and Central America look different without Vanderbilt and Walker. Brought together masterfully by Dando-Collins. I'll never look at Vanderbilt University the same again...nor Nicaragua.
The Real Story About the Founding of a major Southern University! September 17, 2008 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
"In addition to symbolizing a certain lifestyle and founding a major university, Cornelius Vanderbilt engaged in a vicious economic and personal war with William Walker of Nashville. When Walker and his private army invaded Nicaragua, Vanderbilt's fortune was threatened and this true story illustrates all the greed and violence that resulted."
Credibility gap September 11, 2008 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book strikes me as thoroughly unreliable. Though the author is highly enthusiastic (namely for the exploits of William Walker), many of the scenes are suspiciously rich in fine detail, with no clue as to where the details came from. (Example: "With deliberate slowness he lit the cigar. He took several puffs, then thoughtfully studied the glowing tip." No footnote.) Most of the material about Cornelius Vanderbilt appears to be from a historical novel, passed off as a biography, written by Arthur D. H. Smith in 1927. The material about Walker relies on Walker's own book, and on a fishy biography (without footnotes) by A.Z. Carr. The book doesn't cite the most important recent histories of Nicaragua or related topics. The whole thing comes across as made-up stuff based on made-up (or not very reliable) stuff. If you think of this book purely as a novel, not as history, then it's so-so. As history? Forget about it.
The least that could have been done with such exciting materials September 9, 2008 4 out of 6 found this review helpful
The ground here is so fertile; it's a shame that Stephen Dando-Collins does approximately nothing with it. We start with one of the coolest lines in the history of capitalism -- a letter from a tycoon to his erstwhile business partners:
Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
The story of wrongs avenged gets better. Because while Vanderbilt's partners are scamming him, the American William Walker is trying to take over Nicaragua. Vanderbilt needs Nicaragua; the gold rush is heating up in California, and Vanderbilt wants to shuttle passengers from the east coast to the west. Without a railroad or a Panama Canal, the quickest way to do this had been to send them around the southern tip of South America. Vanderbilt had another idea: send boats through the Caribbean to Nicaragua, get on the San Juan River at Greytown, follow the San Juan to Lake Nicaragua, use mules to cover a small strip of ground between the Lake and San Juan Del Sur, and dump them out onto the Pacific. From there, the trip up to California is comparatively short.
There will be conflict eventually. On the one side we have Walker, the American "filibuster" (a term meaning something like "treasure-seeking cowboy" before it meant "reading from the phone book for 72 consecutive hours"), hoping to carve out a new nation under his tutelage in South America. On the other we have a ruthless businessman who needs Walker's territory to make his money. While Vanderbilt plots his enemies' destruction, Walker draws thousands upon thousands of Americans down from the north into his private army and names himself president of Nicaragua. How do those thousands of Americans get there? They need to take ships, obviously. The collision course is set.
Unfortunately, Dando-Collins does as little as possible with these promising materials, and by the end of "Tycoon's War" he reminds us how little he's done with them. For instance: one might want to know what motivates Walker to do what he does. Is it money? Fame? Power? You'd think that in a book ostensibly about "America's Most Famous Military Adventurer," his motivations would be weaved into most every page of the book. Yet Dando-Collins saves them for the end, in a couple-page-long chapter entitled "The Protagonists' Motives." Dando-Collins will soon be releasing an edition of the New Testament with an epilogue entitled "Stuff About Jesus."
Dando-Collins wants us to believe that Walker was hugely important within American history. He may well be, but nothing Dando-Collins tells us would suggest so. The best he can come up with is to note that "To this day, there is an historical marker honoring Walker outside the Nashville house where he was born and grew up." Mt. Rushmore it isn't.
The unfortunate reality seems to be that Dando-Collins is a William Walker fanboy. Near "The Protagonists' Motives," we get this: "Throughout Central America today, Walker's name ranks with that of Hitler and Stalin." That is the sole unflattering line about Walker in the book's 342 pages, and it takes 334 pages to get there. The reader is not equipped to understand why Central Americans might view Walker that way.
We can at least hope for solid military history. "Tycoon's War" is a reasonably engaging on that score, and indeed that seems to be the only part of "Tycoon's War" that really interests Dando-Collins. He mostly lets the Walker biography, the Vanderbilt biography, the broader story of the U.S.'s role in this hemisphere, and the clash-of-titans aspects drop.
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