![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The industrial magnate who pioneered the predatory multinational corporation is surrounded in Chernow's narrative by a memorable cast of friends, relatives, associates and enemies. Although beset most of his life by supplicants, the elder Rockefeller invested shrewdly and used his profits benignly. Jr., a figure of granite respectability, altered the landscape of philanthropy, especially in education and medicine. After John D., the vast family foundations run by successor generations beginning with John D. The earliest entrepreneur in the family was John D.'s bigamist father, ""Devil Bill,"" an itinerant mountebank and phony physician who peddled spurious elixirs. ![]() Chernow, biographer of the Warburgs and the Morgans, has his finest subject in Rockefeller, and is able to furnish anecdotes galore from his encyclopedic research in the family archives. Nearly 98 at his death in 1937, Rockefeller had retired in 1896 to be ""the Lord's fiduciary"" and gave his money away. ![]()
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