The reader gets a real sense of Carnegie's personality from this book. Carnegie was extremely sociable, intelligent, funny, unassuming, and, in a less flattering light, repetitive and stubborn. Nasaw plumbs countless letters, diaries, newspaper articles, and business papers to come up with this complete and extensive picture of one of the most important personalities of the nineteenth century, and I'm glad he did.

Unfortunately the book is simply too long and too suffused with personal details. In fact, Carnegie's character seems so set in stone from an early age that by his 70s it seems unnecessary to quote numberless letters confirming his personal exuberance and optimism. Also, the extensive focus on his personal life (he and his wife's housekeeping, their travels, hobbies, etc.) detracts from a discussion of his more substantial contributions, to business and philanthropy.

Nasaw does show that the 5 foot tall Carnegie bestrode his era like a colossus. His Carnegie Steel Company dominated its industry, as well as railroad and skyscraper construction, for decades. This despite the fact that even though he worked his way up from a poor Scottish childhood, he never believed in excessive work and celebrated the life of leisure even as the leader of one of the world's largest corporations. He basically retired by age forty.

Still, he left numerous other fortunes in his wake, including that of his irascible and unsociable partner Henry Clay Frick, who Carnegie tried to treat like a son and friend but who turned away all of Carnegie's love. When JP Morgan bought out Carnegie Steel in 1901, absorbing it into US Steel, Carnegie found himself the owner of hundreds of millions of dollars in gold bonds that he then used to finance every philanthropic pursuit imaginable. Today there is still Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie-Mellon University, the Carnegie Libraries, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Carnegie Corporation. There are few areas of modern life that his wealth did not touch. Yet Carnegie earned so much money from interest he barely managed to spend it as quickly as he earned it. Despite his best hopes, he still died a rich man. Today, his wealth and foundations live on.

His extensive influence means his life certainly deserves an expansive treatment, but I'm not sure this is one I would recommend.

was a long read. would have been better if it was half as long.

There is nothing more fascinating than a life story. The dice are doubly thrown when sperm meets egg, first in the combination of genes through heredity, and at the same time in the time at which a life comes into being. At birth such powerful factors as temperament are already set, but what tests will temperament meet? Would the great people of one century be great if they were born in another? Almost certainly not. We are the result of our ancestry and also of our time.

There are some characteristics that are beneficial to success regardless of place and time - positive outlook, eagerness to do what is asked, curiosity, intelligence, dedication, etc. These are all things that Andrew Carnegie possessed. What employer doesn't like an employee who gets the job done quickly, thinks of ways to do the job better, puts those ideas to use and never complains?

Rags to riches stories, Carnegie's life being a perfect example, are not to be laughed at. Environment can be met and conquered. We all have to do it just to survive, but when the environment perfectly suits the personality, anything is possible. It's been said of some wealthy people that, were their source of wealth to be eliminated, they would soon be back in the money from another source. This is not fiction, though it is hardly the rule that most wealthy people would like to believe it is.

Author David Nasaw provides the perfect amount of commentary in this epic account of the fascinating life and times of a tiny (5 feet tall) but wonderfully personable man who was a giant of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Any biography needs a well informed author to intercede in her reporting of events to provide background, allowing the reader to fully appreciate the significance of whatever event in a life is being described. At the same time, the author cannot overshadow the individual about whom he writes. Finding the perfect balance, Nasaw makes this 850 page story a delight. You investigate U.S. history as you find out about the man.

Carnegie was overbearing in telling several U.S. presidents what to do and exactly how to do it, but was not one to trifle with as he had the attention and approval of the American public (not to mention his donations). His dedication after retirement to give away his fortune was popular, particularly since he did so in a very public way - donating over 1700 public library buildings and several times that many organs. In addition he started the teachers pension fund that we now know as TIAA and several foundations such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that still operate today. Never at a loss for words, he delighted in answering reporters' questions and relentlessly appeared as a speaker before groups in the U.S. and Europe, where his sense of humor and direct manner always engaged his listeners.

Carnegie was a shrewd businessman. He vowed that he would never be part of any operation that he did not control and he kept his businesses closely held, owning the majority of stock (all privately held) himself. Though already wealthy before getting involved with steel, it was in steel that he became the wealthiest man in the world, due to his own excellent management that always poured earnings back into the company and kept his factories running to keep and win customers even when the market dropped and competitors stopped production. His ability to foresee the market for steel paid off again and again.

Yet he, like all of us, had blind spots. While he claimed that the market should rule, kept the wages of his workforce not a penny higher than that of his non-unionized competitors, and successfully eliminated unions from his factories, he hypocritically approved of the tariff on steel that protected his profits by keeping European competition out of the United States. He claimed to be a working man himself though he had only done manual labor for a year as a young man.

His relationship with Henry Clay Frick, who ran his steel and coke works while Carnegie spent the better part of each year, year after year, enjoying his estate in Scotland or traveling the world is almost a book within the book. Frick endured the sweat and stress and drew the hatred of working men during the infamous company vs labor confrontation at the Homestead mill, while Carnegie enjoyed the profits and gave the impression (a wrong one) that he was removed from the day to day decisions. Credit the telegraph with setting a wealthy man free.

He did not for a moment believe he was depriving the members of his labor force for his own benefit. Instead, he felt that his wealth was better spent (after he personally had all he wanted) on what he considered the public good (libraries, institutes, etc.). Were his men to have better wages, they would only squander it on foolish things such as women and drink. That the thousands of workers who produced his wealth had no say in this was of no matter. In such a way does rationalization work for the wealthy.

From his birth well before the Civil War to his death shortly after the First World War, Carnegie's life was exactly the one he wanted to live. He lacked nothing, enjoyed almost every day and was appreciated not only by the many people he befriended but also by the public at large. He was upbeat to a fault, fun to be with, a perfect and very willing host at his estate and likely to bring a smile to any face, if only for his gnomish appearance.

And I haven't even mentioned his work for world peace, a major part the book!

Why did Andrew Carnegie give away all of his money? This is the question that Carnegie's biographers have to confront. David Nasaw's authoritative new biography goes a long way toward answering the question, even if he cannot—perhaps no biographer can—ultimately fathom Carnegie's complex motives and temperament.

Mr. Nasaw deftly dismisses the conventional explanations. Carnegie did not feel guilty about accumulating a vast fortune. He did not feel he had earned his wealth immorally, let alone illegally. J.P. Morgan's claim that Carnegie became the richest man in the world when he sold his steel corporation to Morgan did not embarrass Carnegie a bit. Carnegie did not build his famous public libraries or establish his endowments for peace and social welfare as public relations ploys. Long before he became a controversial public figure, during a period when he was regarded as a pro-union supporter of the workingman and a rebuke to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he had resolved to divest himself of his capital.

Mr. Nasaw's probes Carnegie's personality and philosophy — which Carnegie wrote up as "The Gospel of Wealth" — to describe an individual who believed he owed his good fortune to his community, a key term in the Carnegian lexicon. Unlike many self-made men (Carnegie was the son of a feckless Scottish weaver), he did not claim he had succeeded through hard work and genius. Carnegie scoffed at businessmen who put in 10- and 12-hour days. Even at the height of his involvement in business, Carnegie rarely spent a full day in his office. He disliked the go-getter mentality and counseled his fellow Americans to make opportunities for leisure. Carnegie loved to travel, read, attend the theater, and generally absorb culture, which he regarded not as a frill but as a necessity.

Carnegie headed for the country's cultural capital, New York City, as soon as he could break away from commitments in Pittsburgh, where he had begun his rise as a messenger boy and telegraph operator before graduating to Pennsylvania railroad executive positions. Pittsburgh had set him up to sell bonds and form partnerships in the iron and steel industries based on insider trading (not yet designated a crime or even considered immoral). What Mr. Nasaw dubs "crony capitalism" formed the basis of Carnegie's success.

But the ebullient Carnegie — one associate called him the happiest man he had ever met — had literary aspirations and quoted Shakespeare liberally. He befriended influential figures like Matthew Arnold and William Gladstone, not to mention the man who became his philosophical mentor, Herbert Spencer. Indeed, Spencer and Shakespeare went hand in hand for Carnegie to the point that he could close a deal quoting either writer.

Herbert Spencer, Mr. Nasaw believes, is the key to Carnegie's decision to give away his money. Spencer believed in evolutionary progress and that the "apogee of human achievement was industrial society," Mr. Nasaw writes. "What counted most for Carnegie was not simply that Spencer had decreed that evolutionary progress was inevitable and industrial society an improvement on its forbears, but that this progress was moral as well as material." Businessmen like Carnegie were not the creators of this progress but its agents. They arose out of the community that fostered their efforts.

In Carnegie's view, Spencer was not merely presenting ideas. For him, Spencer's notions were laws, and so in "The Gospel of Wealth," Carnegie refers to the "Law of Accumulation of Wealth" and the "Law of Competition." In this positivist reading of history, Carnegie met the world head-on — very much as he does in the evocative photograph on the cover of Mr. Nasaw's biography. Carnegie is shown walking toward us, open to whatever experience has to teach him. Naturally, then, he argued that he should give back what the world had, in effect, bestowed upon him. So certain was Carnegie that great wealth must be redistributed that he even argued against the notion of inheritance for children of the wealthy. Let them, as well, meet the world head-on.

With so much empathy for his community, then, how could Carnegie have consorted with Henry Clay Frick, a notorious and brutal strikebreaker? Unions, Carnegie concluded, did not understand that the Spencerian world, had periods of downs as well as ups—as Mr. Nasaw's illustrates in his redaction of the philosopher:

"It seems hard than an unskillfulness which with all his efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artisan," Herbert Spencer had written, almost as if he were advising Carnegie not to give in to the demands of employees. "It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence.

Or as Carnegie himself notes in the social Darwinist "The Gospel of Wealth" (included in a new Penguin paperback edited by Mr. Nasaw): "While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department." As you may already have gathered, Carnegie was a better stylist than Spencer.

But a mystery remains in the heart of Andrew Carnegie's heart. When he published "Triumphant Democracy," which essentially ignored the terrible suffering that Spencer's version of evolutionary progress entailed, Spencer himself wrote Carnegie: "Great as may be hereafter the advantages of enormous progress America makes, I hold that the existing generations of Americans, and those to come for a long time hence, are and will be essentially sacrificed." What did Carnegie say to that? Mr. Nasaw does not comment, except to say, "What mattered most was that he be taken seriously as a thinker and author."

In other words, Mr. Nasaw does not know what Carnegie thought of Spencer's rebuke. Instead of just shilling for capitalism, shouldn't Carnegie have explored its devastating consequences as well? Failure to do so deprived Carnegie of the very status of literary figure and thinker he craved.

Didn't Carnegie understand as much? And shouldn't Mr. Nasaw probe this fatal flaw? Instead, he writes that Carnegie "wore his many hats well." So he did, when he looked in his own mirror. But biography ought to reflect perspectives not available to the subject. Even where evidence is lacking, some rather sharp questions have to be asked of a subject who did so much good while refusing to acknowledge that it arose out of so much questionable philosophy.

This book should be required reading. Not because it is so brilliant or enthralling, but really for the opposite reason: it is a simple rehearsal of a man's life who earned more money, and saw and did more than most of us ever will. And yet at the end of his life he was faced with a reality so completely antipathetic to what he had spent decades trying to achieve, that it literally shortened the book. There is very little to say about Andrew Carnegie in the last four years of his life because the manic activity that had marked his existence until then ended almost overnight.

It made me feel sorry for the man. But in one way he was blessed: he learned during his lifetime that his view of reality was fatally flawed - that he had wasted decades and millions of dollars on a fantasy. I find sadder still the thought that many people will live their entire lives convinced that reality works a certain way but never learning that they are completely wrong.

This book is a call for humility. If you participate in the political discourse of our country you know that millions of Americans (me included) are convinced that they know the way to salvation. Our political leaders have either a) a similar belief or b) a willingness to cynically use this belief in order to gain power. This book shows that the real odds are that we probably have barely a clue. If we really are that clueless, we should be much more humble in our demands that our government create utopia on earth.

Because let's face it: if anyone should have known, it would've been Andrew Carnegie. Again, he lived a life that even today would be a great one. Filthy rich by his early thirties, he spent much of the rest of his life getting his education, publishing books, learning to speak brilliantly, and traveling the world. Summers in Scotland (and why rent when you can become the laird of your own estate!), winters in NY, and various exotic locales in between. He had access to the White House that would make any lobbyist drool, personally knew multiple US presidents, and enjoyed similar access to the British government.

Yes, he should have known the truth, but he didn't. How much hubris must we have to believe that we understand reality and should have the power to force it on others?

Mr. Carnegie's life was an unfavorable commentary on other areas of modern life, too. Specifically, he left school at age 13 to help support his family. This fact, plus his ability to make friends and quickly learn how to complete tasks better than his peers, helped him make a fortune by the age that many American kids leave college. THEN he began his education. Not by going back to high school, but by traveling the world and personally meeting the people that the textbooks were written about. In other words, he gained his education by experience, not theory. His life demonstrates that the "modern" idea that a person has to spend decades in school in order to learn to be a productive member of society is a total myth.

Critics will sniff that Mr. Carnegie earned his fortune as a "robber baron," taking what did not belong to him. Some people call the "gilded age" a time of selfishness that the government saved us from. Well, Carnegie made his first fortune in the railroad business. But if railroad barons where also robber barons, it was BECAUSE of the government, not in spite of it. The transcontinental railroads were almost all government financed. In other words, it was the government that created the monopolists who earned such incredible amounts of money.

The same occurred in the steel business, where Carnegie earned his second, vastly greater, fortune. He benefited from the 35% tariff on imported steel. But again, this demonstrates that it was the government that created the "unfair" distribution of wealth in society, not businessmen or the free market.

And don't let the critics fool you. Carnegie demonstrated several business traits that were fully modern. The steel businessmen often acted as a cartel, colluding to set prices and earn a "fair" return on invested capital. (Even "the rich" have a definition of "fairness"!) Modern political theory says that the government needs to step in and make price collusion a crime. Bolshevik! Carnegie was quite willing to work with the cartel when it suited him. But when prices fell and cartel members demanded lower production to force prices back up, Carnegie demurred. He ordered his managers to keep producing as long as they could cover variable costs. This is modern econ theory 101. Free market competition is quite capable of disciplining price collusion.

Additionally, he continuously poured investment back into his plant, so that he could produce steel more efficiently and make a profit no matter how far prices fell. He ultimately came to control his entire supply chain, and was finally bought out (making him the richest man in the world) when he threatened to integrate forward and begin making finished steel products. Carnegie had excellent business instincts.

Critics will also point to the 12 hour shifts Carnegie insisted on, and how he ruthlessly broke any union that opposed him. This, they will insist, shows how we must have an all-powerful government to step in and ensure workers are "protected" from the robber barons. Uh huh. At best, this substitutes one evil for another. But the reality is that most workers would have had worse prospects outside than inside a Carnegie plant. Many of Carnegie's employees were immigrants from Europe. They would not have come to work in his plants if things were better back in the Old Country. I wish the book would have explored this question more thoroughly.

Part of the shock that Carnegie experienced in old age was probably the realization that politicians had been taking advantage of him for decades. Carnegie's experience has convinced me that Theodore Roosevelt's real political skill was getting people to believe that he was on their side while actually holding a diametrically opposed view. Carnegie sacrificed time, money, effort, and probably family, working for world peace. No politician was more favored by Carnegie than Roosevelt. But few men have been as warlike as Roosevelt, who came to heartily resent Carnegie's meddling. But he didn't resent it enough to stop taking Carnegie's money. The point is that Roosevelt's political career would have been much less succesful without Carnegie's support, and yet Roosevelt actively worked to defeat Carnegie's political goals!

So in a real sense, when WWI broke out, Carnegie lost and Roosevelt won. It broke Carnegie, who stopped corresponding with even his closest friends. I will have to dig out the fawning Roosevelt biographies by Edmund Morris and see how Roosevelt reacted to the unprecendented slaughter of WWI. Perhaps he, too, learned how wrong he was.

I appreciated David Nasaw's writing. He wasted little time analyzing or summarizing Carnegie's life. Any commentary worked itself naturally into the text in a convincing manner. The chapters follow Carnegie's life year-by-year. It was simple, but not simplistic. It helped me understand a time in history, and a man of that day, much, much better.

This is the third biography I read about people that made themselves super rich in the late 1800s in the USA. The other two were Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. That means that it's hard to not review the persons at the same time as I review the book but I will do my best.

Andrew Carnegie grew up in Scotland in a family who were being put out of business by the industrialization. When he was 13 the family moved to Pittsburgh and there Andrew made his fortune. The author tells the story mostly chronological, but also thematic with overlap in time between chapters. That works, but it's easy to lose control of the order things happened in. Since everything a person does or experience will affect future actions, the order kind of matters.

The main source of information seems to be letters. Actually, it seems the only source of information is letters and the occasional newspaper clipping. There are some attempts at analysis but nothing very deep. The most critical part is where the author points out the discrepancies between Carnegie's actions towards unions and labour and his outspoken support of labour and unions.

After getting through all the book, I still don't feel like I know him. I got a feeling for Vanderbilt and for Rockefeller, but not so much for Carnegie. Of the three it seemed Andrew Carnegie was the one that was mostly lucky and that mostly spent his time writing letters to pepole about everything.

To start from the beginning, Andrew Carnegie worked hard in the ironworks, telegraph office and railroad and befriended rich and powerful people. By leeching on to them he made a truck load of money out of nothing (because those businesses were corrupt, not illegally so though, and being an insider at the right time at the right place meant you could make a lot of money). With the money he earned and the contacts he had, he started and bought steel plants at a time when the US had huge tariffs for imported steel and at a time when armor, battleships and houses, as well as railroads needed more steel every year.

Carnegie didn't run the businesses himself but he made sure that they focused on low cost (i.e. long days, no salary for workers, and "special" deals with coke and railroad businesses) and high volume (i.e. low prices to keep the plants running).

The money he took he intended to give away and he did give away a lot of money. While John D. Rockefeller did so because he was a religious fanatic, Carnegie seems to have done so because he wanted to improve the world. His focus was on libraries and organs, but of the hundreds (thousands) of billion dollars he accumulated and gave away in todays money there wasn't enough libraries to consume them all, so there were lots of recipients.

The last years of his long life he spent trying to create the United Nations and international courts to prevent war ever again. He failed and that broke him. Instead the world entered World War I...

So the book, if you are very curious about Andrew Carnegie, sure read it, but it's not a literary masterpiece and I think it's also not very unique in sources and material so there might be better books about him.

I love reading about the gilded age American history. Probably my favorite period of history. There are few individuals that exemplify the struggles, successes, and nuances of this period better than Andrew Carnegie.

I would have liked a deeper dive into his mother. It seems so fascinating to me that he would marry at 52 and only after her death. Loved seeing how he changed year over year and yet was still the same man.

I think there is a lot to love and loath about him. Many traits to be emulated and shunned. Great read and really inspiring! I’ll be thinking about Andrew for a really long time.

It has been quite some time since I've enjoyed a book so much. No, I am not a believer in Carnegie, but Nasaw's writing focused your mind on the positive and not-so-great aspects of this man's life. Honestly, I was saddened to come to the end of this very long book, yet, I felt that we now better understand what motivated his usually strong desire to give so much of his money away. I just wish that Carnegie had been more mindful of the stress of working his men twelve hours a day. Libraries are great, but when would they have time to read and savored a good inspiring book?

Whew! That was a marathon! I listened to this book (originally 33 hours) at playback speeds set to 1.5x, then 1.75x, and the last 6 hours set at 2.15x. It ultimately took 17.7 hours for me to complete this monster.
My interest in Andrew Carnegie was piqued by first reading the novel, Carnegie’s Maid by Marie Benedict. That book practically novelizes the Wikipedia page on Carnegie. So heading into this big book I felt primed for more in-depth biographical facts. What hit me was way more than I expected.
I enjoyed learning about the Scottish heritage and felt connected to my British ancestors who were laborers in the cotton mills, a tailor and shoemaker in Bolton. I could easily imagine young Andrew changing bobbins in the factory. He was such a bright, insightful, clever, ambitious, and tenacious young man.
For many reasons he embodies the American dream. His circle of influence was impressive. He never let anything get in his way of making money. To a great extent he and Warren Buffet are very similar. Both men are flawed, but their sensibilities and philanthropic endeavors outshine their downfalls.

This is a very good biography. I’ve decided I know it is good reading when I feel like I’m living in the life and time of the subject as I am reading along. Being 800 pages this book was with me for an entire week, and my thoughts were drawn to Andrew Carnegie and all those surrounding stories even when I was not reading. That is a good book!

I have a few quibbles, which I feel I am entitled to share given that this author made the conscious decision to publish a story that weighs so much and is so large. Something this big is begging for critique.

When it came to the time of H.C. Frick assuming head of Carnegie Steel and other Carnegie businesses, the narrative moves overwhelmingly to written exchanges between the two. Most of these communications are quoted verbatim. Also, most are only those from Carnegie to Frick. Carnegie wrote in a clipped manner, that reads stream of consciousness, and can be meaningless to a 21st century reader who does not know the mind of the intended recipient.

The extensive quoting of Carnegie’s writings to people continues through, almost, the end of the book. I have many thoughts on this.

1). It would be nice to know what Frick’s reactions to these communications were. Some of Carnegie’s letters/cables were quite nasty. What did Frick think of Carnegie. We find out at the rupture of their business relationship that Frick, at that time, was sick of Carnegie. But, what was the story between them in full? Even this author acknowledges that their successes in life were mutually dependent. But, we are left to rely upon mostly one-side of business communications. Certainly there must be more out there this author could have found to add dimension to this amazing relationship. Statements from fellow board members, business associates? Something! Anything! This biography has a serious hole in not exploring that crucial area. The Frick/Carnegie story - in this book - ends with saying on a certain date when Carnegie discharges Frick as Chairman of the Board, the two never met again. But, was that really all? Carnegie is shown as a very personally friendly man, and one to never held a grudge (he sat down and was pleasant years later with a former aide who had tried to blackmail him). He also seemed to not grasp that people could be so offended by how he treated them. Did he ever try to mend the breach with Frick. Did Frick do anything? I will have to look elsewhere to answer these questions, because this biography is no help.

2). Regarding those quotes, once the quotes start, it seems at times that this author used Carnegie’s letters/cables as the exclusive source for information on some things. It left a lot on the table. Also, I found myself longing for less quotes. So many. So many block quotes. Then, I would think if the author had paraphrased things it wouldn’t have been as thorough a biography. In the end, I think the author went into too much detail on some subjects simply because he had a Carnegie letter in his research file and wanted to use it. This is true for some of the details about setting the prices of steel, prices for coke, and a number of rather mundane matters. I thought the same when when the book moved to Carnegie’s final and lasting project, world peace. Here there were a lot of block quotes, and paragraph quotes of exchanges between Carnegie and political figures. The book dragged. (It also dragged at some of those Frick/Carnegie exchanges and when so many details are presented about Carnegie Steel business.). This is, in part, because nothing happened. Carnegie’s efforts did not go anywhere, with anyone.

On this excessive quoting, there was too often no commentary to it. This author is a good writer. He had my trust throughout this book. During so many pages when I am just reading quotation paragraph followed by Block quote, I would have liked more interjections from this author. He could have added context or commentary to bring it all together.

3). A distraction in the book were the 7-8 times that the author wrote “we” in the book. E.g. “We can find no source to support this statement.” In the over-all manner of this writing the use of “we” was a dead stop in my reading. Who is this “we?” There is only one credited author. We are left to ponder.

My above quibbles are merely that. I hope they will not detract anyone from reading this book. It is one of the better written biographies I have read. It was recommended to me by a very friendly employee at a Barnes and Noble. I ordered the book on the spot and warned her I would hunt her down if I devoted the time it would take to read such a thick book if it turned out to be crap. She assured me the book would not disappoint. She was right.

The book developed personal meaning for me as I was reading because my family is Scottish, my dad is an immigrant who settled in Pittsburgh. I grew up in the area so often referred to in the book. My first books came from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. I was awed by the colossal dinosaur with menacing teeth housing in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I always had to see it when we went to the library or the museum, and just stared at it with wonder. (When Carnegie heard of it being excavated in the Wyoming desert he vowed Pittsburgh would have it, and even went to court to ensure we did.) I remember the first time I heard about the Homestead strike when my dad was driving past the property where the mill once stood (now a giant strip mall and more complex), told me everything a six year old girl could understand about that strike and the Pinkertons, and the deaths.

Carnegie was certainly a complex man and, I find, like most people, he was full of contradictions. He was jolly and kind and generous. He was also mean and ruthless. No way to square that circle. He amassed so much money, some of which came on the backs of breaking unions, paying employees starvation wages while his company and he made (in today dollars) billions of dollars a year in profit. Men died in his mills. Widows and orphans were left with nothing. Those that lived worked 12 hour days, seven days a week in conditions that would break most of us. He left all his money to charity and more than almost anyone else on this earth did good with his gifts. In the end, I do not try to reconcile these contradictory aspects of this man. He was who he was. He is long gone. His dinosaur is still there, and I love that.

poorly written, a good story ruined.

I'm sorry, I just couldn't finish this book. Andrew Carnegie's life is so damn boring! he basically gets rich early by doing some arms-length deals and goes on vacation for about 40 years while cutting wages for his workers and feeling justified in doing so.