Mellon: An American Life - Tapa dura

Andrew Mellon rose to become one of America's greatest financiers. Despite painful shyness and personal misery - his loveless marriage ended in scandalous divorce - he built a mighty and diverse fortune, tracking America's course to global economic supremacy. As treasury secretary under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. he made the federal government run like a business - prefiguring the public official as CEO - and won credit for the Roaring Twenties. But Mellon would stay on too long: blamed for the Great Depression, he eventually found himself a broken icon, his every fiscal assumption overthrown by the New Deal. Prosecuted for tax evasion, Mellon would not abandon his last dream, to make a great gift to America; but he died before his National Gallery of Art was realized. David Cannadine is one of our greatest historians and Mellon is his masterpiece.

David Cannadine was born in Birmingham and educated at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Princeton. He is now the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is the editor and author of many acclaimed books including In Churchill's Shadow and Ornamentalism.