The House of Morgan
A hundred and fifty years of American finance told through one bank: from Junius Morgan's London merchant house through Pierpont's panic-stopping empire to the modern, diminished descendants. Chernow's first book won the National Book Award and invented his method, biography as the history of money itself.
Once Thomas Lamont dies partway through, the narrative loses its human throughline, and the final third, what Chernow calls the Casino Age, turns into a pileup of scandals nobody can quite track; more than one reader advises skipping it outright, tallying “too many actors, too many scandals, too many narrative threads.” The prose downshifts too. Readers point to “physiognomy begets personality sentences” as each new executive gets the same introduction before the book pivots to cataloguing reputational damage, and a reader sums up the stretch in five words: “Geesh, let’s get this thing over with.” The book’s present tense is 1989, with only a brief 2001 preface noting later mergers, so the closing chapters that once felt current now read as the most dated part of the text, and the account stops well short of the 2008 crisis that would have tested its own thesis.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
