For someone who didn't know the personality as well. David Nasaw does a remarkable job walking people through Carnegie's psyche.

I finished reading the book very satisfied. Unsure how much was the personality and life of Carnegie and how much was the storytelling. Both undoubtedly.

I could not think of a person who has had so much impact in the world as Carnegie...one who emigrated from Scotland to US in 1840w and made a name for himself that resonates very strongly until today. He was a man with a plan and executed his life plan accordingly. Make a lot of money so he could distribute it and help others. Also amazed by how much of an optimist he remained esp in his efforts to build a council and institution of world peace.

His philanthropic initiatives are also incredible. And despite never going to school his ability to see the future and focus on building / investing in world class R&D institutions is amazing. For reference he had the equivalent of 120bn$ that he distributed to philanthropic initiatives. Coolest one being the heroes award - the award to reward average citizens that did something heroic on their community. Still exists today.

I will have a new appreciation for Manhattan next time I walk there. Especially as I visit the great public libraries.

Carnegie is the inspiration for Monopoly for a reason. Post civil war was the rise of the industrial age. The expansion of the railroads meant an increase of the steel industry and applying that material to all the buildings and bridges that would build our country. Carnegie, who began as a communications expert along the railroad line. The relationships he made with railroad companies had him moving up and making a salary that led to investing in his future literally.

The railroads were the first large corporations in contrast to the family business that was the norm. Creating a corporation to serve a mass poulation or industry rather than a neighborhood was created merely by seeing a need, investing in materials, and researching and buying mechanical devices that would help produce large quantities of whatever was needed. Cashing out of companies could be just as easy.

Carnegie, built his original salary money by investing in various start ups and then cashing out when he thought best. He found he didn't need to to do physical labor and work 12 hour days to make money. He figured out that money made money. He carried out this philosophy to the fullest by investing and working his capital until he realized that life wasn't complete by just the act of making money, he decided he needed to be well rounded in mind and culture as well and only travel would help him full fill these goals.

Carnegie found people that managed his companies while he travelled the world, collected properties and met the woman he would marry after a 7 year betrothal late in life. He had one daughter and didn't want to burden her with the vast fortunes that would be equivalent to over a hundred billion today. The richest man on the planet at one point decided that he would make as much money as he possibly could (to the expense of his laborers) so that he could give it all back.

He would nearly succeed in spending years of his life giving back with libraries, peace centers, science centers, pensions, hero awards and much more. He not only spent his money but also his time and efforts travelling the world speaking to world leaders about peace before the world wars. He was a self made man and one of the first of his kind in America. He set some norms that would be replicated and some norms that would need to be changed, but his overall intention was to make the most of a natural ability to make money by giving it back to the people who helped him make it.

David Nasaw is a very good writer. His books about William Randolph Hearst and Joe Kennedy were terrific and captured the essence of the subject. He does so with Andrew Carnegie as well. Unfortunately, the essence of Carnegie is that he is an exceedingly dull subject. Completely self delusional, he viewed himself as a benevolent employer when in fact he was a horrid man who routinely underpaid his employees and broke their strikes when they demonstrated for higher wages. He was a chronic name dropper of presidents and prime ministers who he claimed would seek out his advice when, in fact, he offered advice with large contributions so that he was difficult to ignore. Nasaw quotes from Carnegie's letters that brag ad nauseam about his generosity, his lecturing presidents, and his advancement of issues that nobody but he cared about. The last few hundred pages crawled because Carnegie was so boring. Like reading an 800 page Wikipedia entry about his charitable contributions. Written by Carnegie. I will read anything by Nasaw but I pray that his next subject had never met Andrew Carnegie.

This is a very detailed biography/history of Andrew Carnegie - I learned a lot about him that I might have known but didn't fully integrate into my thinking about him. I originally thought of him as a steel entrepreneur with a railroad beginning. I learned that he really had much of his financial success based upon selling bonds, including heavily in Europe, supporting railroads and other American industries.
And he ran his empire, when he established it, in greater Pittsburg from New York and Scotland or elsewhere in his travels. He didn't like being a direct manager of people and delegated to his staff - folks we all eventually know - Frick, Schwab - the nitty gritty although he would set the goals and expectations.
He favored protective steel tariffs while he was in the industry and when he sold out to JP Morgan he totally divested himself from the steel business - taking all bonds backed by gold - and only then did he become more open about freer trade.
But iike John Rockefeller he retired young, Rockefeller kept a lot of equity in his oil businesses, and began to be a philanthogist quite aggressively managing to dispose of most of his forture before his death. Nasaw says that Carnegie had more money than any one percenter today - (written before Bezon got so prosperous?) adjusted for inflation.
So we can look at the ways he built his businesses - because they were truly using the latest technologies and sophisticated management methods. His aversion to real and strong unions was distasteful but the way of capitalists of the time - and he let his lieutenants handle the really dirty work - i.e. Frick at the Homestead works.
He also was a bit of a racist - in that he believed the "English speaking race"- the British/Scottish & Americans were the leaders of the world with more inherent attributes than others - he never broke his ties to his Scottish homeland, hometown and was active there throughout his prosperous life (not before he could afford it). -
But he was a fan of and supporter of Booker T. Washington, the African American educator - but Carnegie believed that the societal role that Washington saw, negros as tradesmen, was the correct was for the Blacks in America - at least at that time.
He of course established so many libraries but did it insect a way that the municipalities that got them had to plan for and establish means to participate in the funding and establish adequate funding for them into the future.
I think that his gifts of organs to churches however was fully funded by him.
His charitable trusts and institutions are still with us today - He founded universities and supported a wide range of institutions.
He was politically active as a Republican - supporting presidents and other politicians - and trying to use his connections to accomplish other goals - for example he helped finance Teddy Roosevelt's post presidential hunting safari to Africa and got a deal in which TR was supposed to try to promote the League fo Peace and to prevent the war.
He also was a strong strong peace advocate - before WW I tried toe stable a League of Peace - maybe the inspired or encouraged the League of Nations - the failure to present WW I, which he tried very hard to do, seems to have been a final for me to read the book - it could be overwhelming for me and was not exciting reading for me. but certainly informational and mind opening.
I have not mentioned his wife and family - nor his writing accomplishments - nor his participation in political affairs.
I may modify this review but the book was a good read - but, for me, slow work.

In depth summary of AC'a life. Extensive references to letters and telegrams.

Represented the conflict between his self image of provider to the common laborer and capitalist as well as his professional persona as a international man of influence.

Interesting historical references to people and places around the northeast USA.

The book ended with his death in 1919 at age 84. With all his wealth it makes you wonder if it was all worth it in the end as he attacked some of his closest business partners and was mocked by his acquaintances of influence.

He justified his choices in life based on the opportunities of the time and came to terms with his result. His moral highland was not always just.

The Star-Spangled Scotsman

This is a solid biography that raises a crucial question that it never answers. As a result it has a very interesting subject but for the wrong reasons.

I will declare an interest. As a little lad every Saturday morning I'd shoulder my green satchel and set off to my nearest library to exchange my borrowed books. My nearest library then was the Lambeth Carnegie library since my legs were short then this still involved the long march down Fawnbrake Avenue pass the Monkey puzzle tree but since Nationalists didn't control the intersections during daylight hours it was safe enough at night perhaps the Kuomintang reestablished control over strategic waypoints on the path to the library - it was hard to know - at the time I'd have been in bed with the bed lamp on reading library booksendowed by the subject of this book and still standing in red brick and yellow stone although I think it is no longer a library but instead a contentious local issue and potentially on the way to becoming a gymnasium or something which for the classical Greeks would have been fine and appropriate no doubt . I'll come back to the libraries later.

The question is how did Carnegie get rich. If Carnegie is the embodiment of the American Dream this is important. The implication is, and apparently there is a lacuna in the evidence, that Carnegie was set up to be a sleeping partner in a railway company (obviously insider dealing was involved, this was the 19th century after all) and then took advantage of the capital/security this gave him. In other words to succeed you don't need hard work and application, you need someone to give you a handful of magic beans.

Carnegie was not a source of creativity in the steel industry as the book makes clear. Rather his access to capital was his competitive advantage - he was able to buy successful steelworks and subsidiary industries, buy expertise, buy patent security, buy political support for armaments projects that required steel and to break strikes. Hard work and application make a Frick (though he got shot for his efforts along the way). Magic beans however make you a titan of industry.

Clearly I benefited from Carnegie's philanthropy. However I can't help feeling that once you've accrued a certain amount of wealth that giving it away becomes a more interesting past time than accumulating more it particularly when giving it away involves asserting your superiority over other people and institutions, here I will point out that the cover features a very small man wearing a very tall hat. Local authorities had to ask Carnegie for the money for the capital investment to build the libraries, but in order to get it had to demonstrate that they would fund the running costs. By the late 1970s, early 1980s when I was going to the library I should think that what had been spent on the operating costs was comfortably in excess of the capital cost of construction. However this the story of a Plutocrat deciding how an elected authority should spend it's money. While I'm happy about the object of investment I'm disturbed at the principle. The power game seems apparent when relatively modest endowments at time of construction would have paid for maintenance, stock and staff, particularly as he was earning money faster through earned interest than he could give it away.

It is more troubling to think that the money was generated through the long working hours and low wages of his employees and that he didn't invest in libraries in those communities where possibly the children of those employees could have studied, improved themselves and escaped poverty or made more of a contribution to the economy. But then philanthropy is a form of conspicuous consumption, the potlatch winner.

Reading between the lines the nature of 19th century capitalism is clear - access to capital is everything. Being a cheery telegraph boy who looks as though he can keep his mouth shut doesn't hurt either.

Carnegie, gone for almost a century, continues to touch the lives of millions of people. He did not just build libraries, he solidified the public library movement by the requiring that cities tax themselves to maintain the gift. The landscape of Carnegie libraries across the world is stunning. While the buildings today are all but obsolete for library service, one wonders how this institution might have developed without his initial impetus. Carnegie made wise investments in the future. He left us not only the libraries but a whole host of educational and arts establishments, hero funds and institutes for the public good.

The paradox, of course, is how this man with so much generosity and foresight, made the money he gave to the future. In his youth, he is what we would call today a "chicken hawk" supporting the Civil War and hiring a replacement so he could sell railroad services to the Union. He began his fortune with what today would be the illegal "insider trading" that landed Martha Stewart and others in jail. His disowning (and denying memory of) his labor practices in interviews and hearings certainly suggests he knew the moral issues involved. While his employees worked 12 hour days (probably his manager Frick too) in industrial heat, he enjoyed a 4 hour day when he worked. We have heard of absentee landlords, here is the ultimate absentee. Nasaw points out his tariff protected profits grew exponentially, while his workers' incomes declined 67%.

Nasaw gives us, essentially, a reference book on this remarkable man. He came from poverty in Scotland where he was influenced by his Chartist uncles. Equal to his optimism, prescience on business, world events and the role of women, race, peace and disarmament, is his blind spot to the feelings of not just the underpaid and overworked mill workers but also those whom he trusts such as Frick, Taft and T. Roosevelt.

We get a small portrait of wife, Louise and gilmpse of their daughter, Margaret. Louise, in a pre-nup agrees to give away his/her fortune. We don't learn about successive generations. Mother and daughter are of interest, since, the philanthropy set their lives on a different course than their financial peers.

Biographers have to make decisions as to whether their book will be an interesting story for the general reader or a documentation of all that is unearthed. Nasaw achievement is that he has opted for documentation, and has put it together in a readable way. Many will pass it up for its length, but for another group, it will be a must read and keep. For the next biographer, whom I predict will delve into Carnegie's inner life this volume will undoubtedly serve as a road map.

I love the cover! The b & w photo, the robber barron attire and posture, and the kindly Santa Claus face! It's like he is staring out at you through the ages.

I am consistently fascinated by this era in American history. It was an interesting book, nothing terribly salacious or taboo that one usually comes across in regard to the extreme rich. It is interesting how literally became the richest man in the world, especially since all the anti-trust laws weren't in place then. But it was a thorough book about an honest man who used his wealth to enhance the lives of others.

During the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches fanned the flames of the national myth that any person, no matter their economic background, could make it rich in the free market and opportunity-prone economy of the United States. While many scholars have focused on how mythical this was--the rich and privileged had obvious head starts and unique advantages over lower class Americans and less well-connected immigrants--Andrew Carnegie is a living embodiment of someone who came to America in poverty and became not only wealthy, but one of the wealthiest men in the world in his lifetime. Unlike other men of wealth, Carnegie did not preach the virtues of "hard work." In fact, as he earned money, climbed the economic ladder, and took more and more managerial roles, he worked less and less hours and made more and more money in a reverse ratio. He coined and promoted the "Gospel of Wealth" to describe how taking opportunities and getting lucky on timing is what really leads one to financial success. While he was a shrewd businessman to be sure, he tried to distance himself from [union] workers, because he did not have patience or sincere empathy for them. Instead he publicly made statements to the effect that he took their side--well-paid workers ensures the best quality work--while scheming behind the scenes to ensure financial viability (thus he would cut wages as needed but slide work hours from 8-12 hours a day so that the workers could still get "enough" money and he wouldn't lose out on production).

Born in Scotland, his family moved to Pennsylvania in the mid-nineteenth century. Carnegie moved from manual labor to technical work (sending/receiving telegraph messages) to managerial work seeing to the construction of telegraph lines and then railroad lines. His BIG money, however, first came with oil investments right before the Civil War when its use--replacing whale oil--was first being developed. From their he invested and heavily. Eventually he would best become associated with establishing--dominating more accurately--the steel industry in Pittsburg. He was a philanthropist, donating funds particularly for public libraries and theaters with the idea that high culture and learnedness should be offered to the lower classes for free that they might benefit therefrom. He spent a good chunk of his time traveling in Europe as well as selling bonds there. He always had ambitions to catch up on what he felt was a cultural illiteracy of European high arts so that he could be a world-class writer. He did not marry until his 50s and had one daughter. Overall, he was a complicated man. He made tons of money and lived a life without want but felt duty-bound (not religiously or guilt-driven however) to donate his wealth to education and public services. He benefitted tremendously from wartime demands for steel, oil, and other investment returns during the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war, but he traveled and promoted his peace program in an attempt to prevent world war. This is a very interesting person, and David Nasaw has done an admirable job researching and crafting this biography.

*(pp. 1-255, 309-427)

I consumed this 800 page biography at home and while traveling in trains and planes. It’s a huge book on a character whose name we now associate mostly with a few buildings and charity foundations. It was a long slog to consume – but the main reason I managed to complete it is the wonderful and lucid writing of the author – David Nasaw. Throughout we are given a lively picture of the era and the personalities – from Andrew Carnegie, his mother, wife and daughter, his several business partners (such as Henry Clay Frick), and to the Presidents he sought to influence.

We follow Andrew Carnegie from a poor family that emigrated from Scotland to the U.S. (Pittsburgh) – and how he became a rich businessman – very rich. Overall I found him to be a quirky fellow. But he was no dour Scotsman – he was very talkative on a great range of subjects and was forever optimistic. He formed lasting friendships easily, mostly with men.

He had his mother live with him until she died in 1886, when he was 50 years old. Up to that time he had been pursuing, on and off, Louise Whitfield for several years. They finally married in 1887, she was 30 and he was 51. Their first and only child (Margaret) was born in 1897. Part of what I am trying to point out is that the guy, who was a millionaire several times over and would be quite ruthless in his business dealings – did not want to unsettle the relationship he had with his mother, by marrying the woman he loved.

Carnegie always seemed to be flying at a very high altitude above his factories - especially his iron and steel workers. He could not see the drudgery of their lives. He himself was very careful to not overwork himself – and was perpetually on vacations, whether in Europe or in the U.S. Carnegie was a traveling phenomenon - and crossed the Atlantic several times – and did one world tour. He was constantly advising his business associates of the importance of time off – and often would take them on his jaunts (all expenses paid for). But not his factory workers, who he kept on a 12 hour day, seven days a week. At one point the unions succeeded in getting an 8 hour day. Carnegie then proceeded to crush the unions – and it was back to lower salaries and a 12 hour day. Carnegie was no friend of the worker – but he was totally oblivious to this – thinking that he was beloved by them because he gave them employment.

Possibly he felt his donations, the building of libraries and philanthropies, made up for this. Many buildings, in Pittsburgh and New York, bare his name. The author does not explore the idea that Carnegie sought to immortalize himself through these grandiose structures. Many libraries in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. were started and funded by Carnegie. Interestingly he also believed that wealth should not be inherited – that it should be given away (or otherwise to be taxed by the government).

After he retired in the 1890’s (J.P. Morgan bought off his iron and steel companies) Andrew Carnegie became a tireless crusader for world peace. This is commendable. But like many business people who become involved in politics he overestimated his influence; perhaps not realizing that politicians would not behave like his salaried business partners. Presidents, like Teddy Roosevelt, became irritated of Carnegie’s sometimes fawning and other-times unstoppable flow of advice. Carnegie did not realize that he was being scorned and ridiculed behind his back. Mark Twain, a friend of Carnegie, also was given to caustic remarks.

The author gives a wide canvas – but as mentioned, the length is excessive.

I agree with another reviewer who said that throughout the book he loathed and then pitied Carnegie. Quite a fascinating read. Also interesting to see how different he was from other "richest men of the world" of his time, especially Rockefeller, in that he wasn't religious at all and how almost all his management was done remotely (quite a novel concept for that time).

Comprehensive biography that gave a pretty thorough feel for the times. Would have liked a bit more on the business angle at times. As with all (almost all) biographies, the subject dies in the end. It's a bit sad that he dies broken-hearted at having vainly tried to anoint several earthly princes of peace and assure them of their immortality. He was a man of his times with his faith in human reason.