Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [122]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES SLACK is the author of Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century, named one of the New York Public Library’s twenty-five “Books to Remember” for 2002, and Blue Fairways: Three Months, Sixty Courses, No Mulligans. His writing has appeared in many national magazines. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Barbara, and their daughters, Natalie and Caroline.
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PRAISE FOR
HETTY
“During her lifetime, journalists were quick to describe her as the ‘least happy woman in New York,’ but Slack appears to get it right. ‘In the end,’ he says, ‘her principle crime seems to have been that the rules she chose to live by were her own rather than society’s.’ … Which practically makes you want to say, ‘You go, girl!’”
—New York Times Book Review
“This book is more than the story of an eccentric, driven woman; it is a window on the country between the Civil War and World War I, when great fortunes were made—even by a woman.”
—USA Today
“Using the effortless prose and pacing of a novelist … Charles Slack has taken the Guinness Book’s cartoon villain and transformed her into a compelling, if often contradictory, character, a product of the Victorian age, but also a woman well ahead of her time…. More than a skillful character study … [Hetty] offers a glimpse into Manhattan high society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…. [A] page-turning portrait of an important and complicated woman … [and] the economic forces that mold people and places.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“A fascinating book.”
—New York Post
“Gossipy yet enlightening.”
—Elle Readers’ Prize 2005
“A lively and engaging portrait of the nineteenth century’s Martha Stewart—Hetty Green, the irascible and ruthless female tycoon who took Wall Street by storm…. This detailed account will no doubt delight readers of nineteenth-century financial history and anyone who likes a good story.”
—Library Journal
“A wonderfully detailed new biography…. Today’s vilified moguls look like pussycats compared with Hetty, who was known in her day as the Witch of Wall Street.”
—Forbes
“[A] nuanced portrait.”
—Newsweek
“Slack concentrates on telling a good story and telling it well…. [An] entertaining biography.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fascinating…. Hetty portrays the so-called Witch of Wall Street as an extremely intelligent woman who was tough and gifted enough to build one of America’s most impressive fortunes.”
—Tucson Citizen
“[An] instructive account of a cash-crazy financier whose wealth could never exceed her dreams of avarice…. Slack offers an exemplary retelling for a new generation.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The most successful female financier of the early twentieth century was a woman most of us never heard of named Hetty Green. Charles Slack has written an enormously readable book about a brilliant, avaricious, and complicated woman who accumulated vast wealth and bested some of Wall Street’s most notable players. The story of her life is a fascinating snapshot of how ambition and greed provided unique success in an era not known for female financial accomplishment.”
—Arthur Levitt, former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and bestselling author of Take on the Street: What Wall Street and Corporate America Don’t Want You to Know
“Written with grace and authority, Hetty—Charles Slack’s follow-up to the splendid Noble Obsession—further establishes Slack not just as a worthy chronicler of the roots of American business but also of the American story itself—and of the fascinating, unquenchable men and women who people it.”
—Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival
“In his new book, Charles Slack gives us, at long last,