How to fritter away a family fortune

Anderson Cooper begins his and Katherine Howe’s splendid book with a vignette about his father taking him, age 6, to see the statue of his great-great-great-grandfather “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt outside New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Young Cooper’s takeaway was “that all grandparents turned into statues when they died.”

Until the death in 2019 of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, Cooper spent most of his life downplaying his Vanderbilt-ness. When people asked him what it was like to be a scion of the famous clan, he would reply that he wasn’t a Vanderbilt, he was a Cooper. His father, Wyatt, Gloria’s fourth husband, grew up on a small farm in Mississippi and imbued his talented and able son with a quality not in overabundance among his maternal ancestors: down-to-earthiness. Thank you, Dad.