by James Fox

Simon and Schuster, 496 pp., $30.00

 

1.

In the early 1980s, the English writer James Fox was shown a large trunk at his grandfather's house in Northamptonshire covered in Cunard and White Star steamship stickers. On inspection it turned out to contain thousands of letters between the Langhorne sisters, as well as other correspondence, carefully collected and preserved by his grandfather, Robert Brand, who had married one of them. It was a collection, Fox writes, made possible by two or three posts a day and the convention of returning letters to their senders "in time of grief." That first encounter with the trunk has led to his absorbing chronicle of a Virginian family which

by Niall Ferguson

Viking, 658 pp., $34.95

 

by Niall Ferguson

Penguin, 518 pp., $18.95 (paper)

 

1.

In his delightful memoirs, the art historian Kenneth Clark recalls that Lord Cunliffe, governor of the Bank of England, came to lunch with his father on August 2, 1914. "There's talk of a war," said Lord Cunliffe, "but it will never happen; the Germans haven't got the credits." Almost a century earlier Gutle Rothschild, widow of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, is supposed to have said of a dispute between England and Prussia, "It won't come to war; my sons won't provide money for it." Niall Ferguson's extraordinary book is both a history

by Jean Strouse

Random House, 796 pp., $34.95

 

When John Pierpont Morgan died in 1913, he was the most powerful banker in the world. As the main conduit for British foreign investment into North America he helped transform the United States from a society of yeoman farmers into an industrial colossus. More controversially, Morgan helped change competitive business into what Lenin called "monopoly capitalism." His bank financed the consolidation of large sectors of the American transportation, steel, and electricity industries. Most of this made economic sense, eliminating destructive competition, stabilizing the market, and lowering costs to the consumer through economies of scale and marketing. But the