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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
informative
slow-paced
Competent, but less than riveting in the long run because he simply had a rather boring live. Also, Chernow sometimes sounds a little too forgiving of Senior and Junior's reactionary impulses, especially in the Ludlow massacre episode. Too forgiving for my taste, anyway. Otherwise, it seems a pretty balanced picture.
I didn't know a lot about Rockefeller when I started reading this, but I enjoyed how the material was presented and how much commentary was added. There are a lot of little great details about Rockefeller's life that show you a great deal about the man's personality and how he formed his decisions. The book went to great lengths to inform you of all of the surrounding characters of Rockefeller's life, almost to the point that the author seemed to want to write more about the side characters than Rockefeller himself. There are several "side characters" that have pages and pages of historical information written about them in this book, but only had a small part to play in Rockefeller's life. While I think the author did this for complteness of content, sometimes it made me feel as if the point the author was trying to make was wandering.
Learned a lot about this “Titan”. Knew of the family’s involvement with the creation of Acadia, but did not know how much they influenced the creation of other national parks.
A highlight for any Hoosier reading this book: it mentions how the office for Standard Oil of Indiana was in CHICAGO. Of course.
Like most Chernow books, this one will take you a while. Also like most Chernow books, Titan is throughly researched and extremely engrossing. Chernow is able to somewhat walk the line of the hero worship and vitriol of John D (albeit somewhat leaning towards the worship), and is able to give his readers a fresh look at this important man.
Chernow is quickly becoming one of my favorite historians! While I realize that nearly every author probably can't help but include some element of "spin," the depth and detail of his research helped to convince me that he was as intellectually honest as he could possibly be with the evidence available.
I went in to this biography with a preconceived notion of John D Rockefeller, Sr; I thought he was a greedy scoundrel who was more or less responsible for the state of modern medicine as we know it: specifically, "sick care" which involves treating symptoms with drugs that suppress and cause a myriad of other problems, rather than trying to get to the root cause and heal the patient. I believed, based on what I had heard, that he was not content with the billions he had made in Standard Oil and the railroads, and that the Flexnor Report of 1910 was his attempt to squash all competition and achieve a complete monopoly in medicine, too.
As I listened to the story of his very difficult upbringing, with a bigomist charlatan father who abandoned his mother and the family, I felt sorry for John. I admired his hard work and determination to pull himself up by his bootstraps and make something of himself despite his background, and his bent toward philanthropy even from an early age, when he had very little to give away. He was an extremely devout Baptist, with vision and conviction that God would prosper him not for his own sake, but so that he could be a blessing to the world. Of course his strict Baptist views had their down sides--he was a bit of a Pharisee, not only in his own life but in how he raised his family too--but Chernow convinced me that he was genuine.
As Chernow chronicled Rockefeller's rise in the business world, the creation of Standard Oil, etc, I kept waiting for the turning point, when Rockefeller would turn "to the dark side." I began to be confused that it just didn't come. He was cutthroat, surely, and he did drive competitors out of business and form a decided monopoly--even though he did what he could to make it look like he hadn't. He'd purposely allow a few little minor competitors to survive so that when accused of monopoly, he could point to them like a fig leaf and claim, "no I haven't, see?" But, so far as I could tell, nothing he did was truly illegal. And meanwhile, he was always personally extremely generous. His terrible reputation seems to have stemmed almost entirely from a journalist with a personal vendetta against him because she blamed him for her father's death, due to his working conditions. Ida Tarbell published a series of exposes in a newspaper that captured the entire world's attention, in a serial style like one of Charles Dickens' novels. During that time, Rockefeller became one of the most hated men in the world. Some of what Tarbell wrote about him was true, but some were misleading "spin" and outright lies. And I found myself sympathizing with Rockefeller and his family as the stress of this took its toll on their health.
Still, I waited to hear how Rockefeller became the founder of the monopoly of allopathic medicine, particularly since it was mentioned on several occasions that when he faced his own health challenges, he was partial to osteopathy, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and natural cures. It wasn't until he was well into retirement that he ventured into the medical arena, and he did so as a philanthropist, not as a business venture. He also did not do so personally; his charitable giving had long become such a monumental undertaking that he hired Frederick Gates (no relation to Bill; I checked) to distribute his wealth and decide where the money should go. The focus on medicine was Gates' idea. Gates, too, was the one who had a bone to pick with homeopathy; Rockefeller himself always preferred it and found himself overruled by his various boards when his own ventures helped to crush the chiropractic, osteopathic, and homeopathic colleges around the world. At the same time, I can almost see why that happened; there was no standardization of medical learning, and many of the schools had very substandard education and little to no entrance requirements. The idea of requiring a certain standard seemed a good one. I suppose, like anything else, the question then becomes--who decides what those standards are? And what's their incentive to do so? A good idea can easily be corrupted when men's own self-interest gets involved.
So Chernow managed to change my perspective on Rockefeller. I don't think he was a villain at all anymore. I think he was a flawed man, of course, but he had many admirable qualities and he overcame a great deal of hardship both in his youth and later, when his wealth made it seem as though everyone wanted his pocketbook rather than himself. It seems to me that he did better than most would have done, in his exalted position.
I went in to this biography with a preconceived notion of John D Rockefeller, Sr; I thought he was a greedy scoundrel who was more or less responsible for the state of modern medicine as we know it: specifically, "sick care" which involves treating symptoms with drugs that suppress and cause a myriad of other problems, rather than trying to get to the root cause and heal the patient. I believed, based on what I had heard, that he was not content with the billions he had made in Standard Oil and the railroads, and that the Flexnor Report of 1910 was his attempt to squash all competition and achieve a complete monopoly in medicine, too.
As I listened to the story of his very difficult upbringing, with a bigomist charlatan father who abandoned his mother and the family, I felt sorry for John. I admired his hard work and determination to pull himself up by his bootstraps and make something of himself despite his background, and his bent toward philanthropy even from an early age, when he had very little to give away. He was an extremely devout Baptist, with vision and conviction that God would prosper him not for his own sake, but so that he could be a blessing to the world. Of course his strict Baptist views had their down sides--he was a bit of a Pharisee, not only in his own life but in how he raised his family too--but Chernow convinced me that he was genuine.
As Chernow chronicled Rockefeller's rise in the business world, the creation of Standard Oil, etc, I kept waiting for the turning point, when Rockefeller would turn "to the dark side." I began to be confused that it just didn't come. He was cutthroat, surely, and he did drive competitors out of business and form a decided monopoly--even though he did what he could to make it look like he hadn't. He'd purposely allow a few little minor competitors to survive so that when accused of monopoly, he could point to them like a fig leaf and claim, "no I haven't, see?" But, so far as I could tell, nothing he did was truly illegal. And meanwhile, he was always personally extremely generous. His terrible reputation seems to have stemmed almost entirely from a journalist with a personal vendetta against him because she blamed him for her father's death, due to his working conditions. Ida Tarbell published a series of exposes in a newspaper that captured the entire world's attention, in a serial style like one of Charles Dickens' novels. During that time, Rockefeller became one of the most hated men in the world. Some of what Tarbell wrote about him was true, but some were misleading "spin" and outright lies. And I found myself sympathizing with Rockefeller and his family as the stress of this took its toll on their health.
Still, I waited to hear how Rockefeller became the founder of the monopoly of allopathic medicine, particularly since it was mentioned on several occasions that when he faced his own health challenges, he was partial to osteopathy, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and natural cures. It wasn't until he was well into retirement that he ventured into the medical arena, and he did so as a philanthropist, not as a business venture. He also did not do so personally; his charitable giving had long become such a monumental undertaking that he hired Frederick Gates (no relation to Bill; I checked) to distribute his wealth and decide where the money should go. The focus on medicine was Gates' idea. Gates, too, was the one who had a bone to pick with homeopathy; Rockefeller himself always preferred it and found himself overruled by his various boards when his own ventures helped to crush the chiropractic, osteopathic, and homeopathic colleges around the world. At the same time, I can almost see why that happened; there was no standardization of medical learning, and many of the schools had very substandard education and little to no entrance requirements. The idea of requiring a certain standard seemed a good one. I suppose, like anything else, the question then becomes--who decides what those standards are? And what's their incentive to do so? A good idea can easily be corrupted when men's own self-interest gets involved.
So Chernow managed to change my perspective on Rockefeller. I don't think he was a villain at all anymore. I think he was a flawed man, of course, but he had many admirable qualities and he overcame a great deal of hardship both in his youth and later, when his wealth made it seem as though everyone wanted his pocketbook rather than himself. It seems to me that he did better than most would have done, in his exalted position.
Any book about a man as powerful as Rockefeller is bound to tread lightly on his crimes and this book is no different. Criminals like Rockefeller seldom left a paper trail and made much effort to underlings make the really nasty decisions, like carry out the Ludlow Massacre. And yet Chernow digging down and bringing a more nuanced view of Rockefeller than we might expect. This book also provides an excellent look into the development of the modern corporate world that so dominate today.
informative
slow-paced