An account of a bygone world of privilege, money, power, and self-indulgence set in monumental mansions and country estates. Vanderbilt: The very name is synonymous with the Gilded Age. The family patriarch, "the Commodore," built a fortune that made him the world's richest man by 1877. Yet less than fifty years after his death, no Vanderbilt was counted among the world's richest people. Written by descendant Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children...

Anderson Cooper chronicles the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty--his mother's family--the Vanderbilts.

"Lusitania: She was a ship of dreams, carrying millionaires and aristocrats, actresses and impresarios, writers and suffragettes - a microcosm of the last years of the waning Edwardian Era and the coming influences of the Twentieth Century. When she left New York on her final voyage, she sailed from the New World to the Old; yet an encounter with the machinery of the New World, in the form of a primitive German U-Boat, sent her - and her gilded passengers...

An American aristocrat--a descendant of founding father John Jay--Susan Mary Alsop (1918-2004) knew absolutely everyone and brought together the movers and shakers of not just the United States, but the world. Henry Kissinger remarked that more agreements were concluded in her living room than in the White House. In 1945 Susan Mary joined her first husband, a young diplomat, in Paris, where she was at the center of the postwar diplomatic social circuit,...