Andrew Carnegie by david nasaw

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Carnegie being one of the greatest corporate leaders ever, I picked up this book to learn about how he did it. While the book is built on very solid researched as well as being well narrated, I was initially disappointed that it didn't provide much of a business perspective. Instead, this book focuses on Carnegie on a very personal level - how he was as a person and in his dealings with other people. Alas, I had to admit that this is also what makes a great businessman.

This book will definitely be interesting to read for anyone interested in Carnegie, but don't expect to gain much insight into the financial side of his business philosophy.

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Marayder

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This is what reading it was like: Andrew went to his summer home to play golf. There he wrote a bunch of letters to important people. Here is each letter, and it's reply, word for word. Then he talked to someone else, and this is exactly what he said. Here is the author's take on that. Pretty interesting, huh? Then he donated some money. This is what Carnegie thought about donating money. Here are the things he donated money to. Then he wrote a letter about it, and this is exactly what he wrote.

I'm sorry to say that I was looking forward to Andrew Carnegie's death. This book was just so long and detailed that it became a chore to read. His life was pretty darned interesting, and there were moments where I was like "oh okay, that's interesting." But the interesting bits are drowned in an ocean of minute detail.

One interesting bit is how he was so generous in giving away his fortune, but a total opressive dick to his factory workers.

A quarter of the way in, I ended up listening to it exclusively at the gym so I could get through it an hour at a time and not care if I'm not really paying much attention. I think an abridged version would be more appropriate, maybe about 25% to 35% in length.

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RegOps10

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

No doubt about it this biography by David Nasaw is well researched and well written. This biography, like others, devotes considerable attention to Mr. Carnegie's outstanding record of philanthropy. This is the aspect of his career, Mr.Carnegie wished to emphasize.
However, what sets this book apart from other biographies is the author's extensive research into Carnegie's own correspondence. For the first time the readers see the stark contradictions between the public man and the private man. For example, during the violent Homestead strike, the author presents Carnegie's own correspondence urging his partner Henry Frick to "break the union" and hire scabs to replace striking workers. Carnegie, in fact, played a major role in forcing workers to accept the 12-hour day again rather than the 8-hour day that had been established under the previous contract.
Yet when the Homestead strike devolved into brutal violence, Carnegie distanced himself from the situation while he vacationed in Scotland. He had the audacity to suggest that he would have handled things differently had he been in charge of the negotiations. The author points to instances when Carnegie in fact refused to meet with union representatives in an attempt to avoid the bloodbath. He maintained that he was no longer involved in day-to-day management of his company when in fact he was intricately involved with every aspect of the firm especially labor issues.
All the while, Carnegie maintains that it is far better to make major donations to art museums, libraries and music halls where his name is emblazoned on the buildings than it is to "fritter away" company profits on employees who would use the small extra earnings for clothing and food.
The author goes into great detail describing Carnegie's philosophy of establishing a sliding wage scale for workers and then shows the hypocrisy by noting that the wage rates were not tied to earnings but to the price of steel. If the price of steel declined because of productivity increases, the workers did not share in the profits.
I commend the author for telling both sides of the story. The great philanthropy of Carnegie has certainly made a difference but to whom? While the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh is wonderful, the author notes that it was not built in an area where steel workers could benefit but was constructed in a well-to-do section of the city. Workers forced to work 12 hours a day six days a week had little time to enjoy libraries and museums.
I'm sure that Carnegie felt terrible about the Homestead violence. In some respects the author suggests Carnegie gave away much of his fortune to atone for his part in this dismal history of his company. I thank Mr. Nasaw for documenting it for posterity.

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Woolskull

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

On the positive side, Nasaw did an incredible amount of research. This is surely the definitive biography of Andrew Carnegie. He also writes clearly, and the book is fairly well organized.

However, the prose is plain and unremarkable and the narrative is not cohesive and compelling. Nasaw also seems to give equal attention to everything that occurred in Carnegie's life and does not emphasize what is really important. He just goes from one event to another.

I slogged through most of this book. It was too long, too detailed, and highly repetitive. A book half of its length would have been far better!

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LonelyLittleStar

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I've long been fascinated with the Gilded Age and this book has been a great treasure trove of information. It was surprisingly readable for a biography, though I do have to complain about the way that the timeline seemed to jump a bit. It didn't detract too much from the overall reading experience, but when one seeks out to have a clear timeline, one is forced to read some things over again. (And I also had a hard time dealing with the fact that I feel as if the Johnstown flood thing wasn't given enough notice.)

The portrait that it paints of Carnegie, I have to say, is surprisingly likeable. (Though that might just be my fascination with the man talking.) What I found particularly striking is his relationships towards Tom Scott, H. C. Frick, and the later presidents of the latter half of his life. I even found myself chuckling a bit when I read the parts about his too-large ego (particularly during the times that he saw fit to lecture the presidents), which is quite surprising to say the least. I had formed several ideas as to what my reading experience of this book would be like but never once did I think that I would actually be laughing. That should tell you something about the readability of this book.

Then again, I am horribly attached to the figures of the Gilded Age so I might be a bit biased here.

I finished this book left with great respect towards Andrew Carnegie (not that I haven't respected him before--you could say that I just respected him even more), though a bit disillusioned about some aspects of his life. I'm willing to bet on the fact that Carnegie spent the majority of his life vacationing rather than actually doing business. I'm also rather turned off by the whole Homestead affair, which isn't that strange (I mean, who wouldn't be turned off by Homestead thing?). I've also found the man to be very hypocritical, which I didn't really expect so that's kind of a surprise.

I'm not gonna lie, I still like the man very much and I look up to him, but this biography gave me a portrait of 'Andrew Carnegie: The Man' instead of 'Andrew Carnegie: The Philanthropist' or 'Andrew Carnegie: The Self-Made Millionaire', and that is more than I could ever have asked.

Overall, a great book.

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Adames_yh

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

while watching a history channel series on industrial titans of the 19th and early 20th century, it occurred to me that I owned a copy of this bio of Andrew Carnegie as they interviewed the author, David Nasaw as one of their talking heads. While my lasting impression of the history channel series was that it deserved very low marks,(they also used Donald Trump as one of their modern day talking heads, that alone disqualifies the series as any serious review of history)David Nasaw's book was pretty exhaustive in his coverage of Carnegie's life.

For most of the book, I harbored the impression that Carnegie was a delusional hypocrite and indeed his single minded drive to amass wealth so he could give it away later came at the cost of treating his workers as virtual captive slaves. He never seemed to understand or care that his laborers were actual human beings and his breaking of the Homestead strike was the clearest demonstration of just how callous and oblivous he was. He may have given the Pittsburgh people a beautful library, but they were never given a day off to visit it as he insisted on 12 hour days, seven days a week.

This is an 800 page tome, and it certainly took me a long while to get thru it. The other striking thing about Carnegie was that he spent the vast majority of his life, after amassing his wealth at a very early age, on vacation. All the time sending directives to his managers about how to break the unions, fire anyone who might protest those twelve hours days. As I said, an ultimate hypocrite.

Then Nasaw turns the tables abit as Carnegie in his later years, completely out of the steel business and in the business of giving away his money, turns his attention to trying to bring the principle nations to a mutal table in the name of peace. He works himself to exhaustion in the cause, and when World War 1 breaks out, his heart breaks and the reader finally really feels sympathy for him.

Not a casual read, but one with a strong message for all the hedge fund and wall street millionaires. if you make your money on the backs of those under your control or at your mercy, the world will remember you for the asshole you are.

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Demigod_Zyon

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I've been reading a series of books on the business forefathers (Carnegie, Rockafeller, Morgan, so far.) To quote Mark Twain (of who Carnegie was a good friend), History doesn't repeat itself but it sure does rhyme. I see the comparisons to the Zuckerbergs, Bezos, Musks, Trumps, Bidens, etc. of today's modern age and how the stories might play out. As for the book itself, it's an entertaining read that can get repetitive at moments (no fault of Nasaw, but Carnegie was a repetitive guy.)

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eroeru

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

An exceptional biography of an exceptional individual. The author takes you behind the scenes to understand the making of this remarkable American capitalist of the gilded age. Born into poverty in Scotland, Andrew was smart, hardworking, and curious. The eternal optimist and cheerful man who cherished any opportunity to read and improve his mind.

He escaped poverty, educated himself, built a remarkable business from the ground-up that made him the richest man in the world, constantly expanded his mind intellectually be-friending the most important figures in the world, traveled the world over to make more sense of it, became a leading advocate for peace in the world and then finally deployed his wealth back to society. To the arts, libraries, universities, and more, saying "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced".

His business acumen and allocation of capital skills were legendary, his ability to be witty and make friends is awe-inspiring but most of all his early understanding of wanting to deploy all of the wealth back into society in order to aid the evolution of humankind and progress in society by focusing on where he deployed this wealth is breathtaking. He may have been small in stature but he was a giant amongst men intellectually.

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