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Title: A Disposition to Be Rich
Author: Geoffrey C. Ward
Narrator: Robertson Dean
Format: Unabridged
Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
Language: English
Release date: 05-07-12
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 9 votes
Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Criminals
Publisher's Summary:
How a small-town pastor's son ruined an American president, brought on a Wall Street crash, and made himself the best-hated man in the United States.
Ferdinand Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his generation - a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street, who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid scheme that ultimately collapsed in one of the greatest financial scandals in American history.
The son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor with secrets of his own to keep, Ward came to New York at 21 and in less than a decade, armed only with charm, energy, and a total lack of conscience, made himself the business partner of a former president of the United States and was widely hailed as the "Young Napoleon of Finance". In truth, he turned out to be a complete fraud, his entire life marked by dishonesty, cowardice, and contempt for anything but his own interests.
Drawing from thousands of never-before-examined family documents, Geoffrey C. Ward traces his great-grandfather's rapid rise to riches and fame, and his even more dizzying fall from grace. There are mistresses and mansions along the way; fast horses, crooked bankers, and corrupt New York officials; courtroom confrontations and six years in Sing Sing; and Ferdinand's desperate scheme to kidnap his own son to get his hands on the estate his late wife had left the boy.
A Disposition to Be Rich is a great story about a classic American con artist, told with boundless charm and dry wit by one of our finest historians.
Critic Reviews:
"[Ward] narrates a rollicking financial picaresque, but infuses it with psychological depth." (Publishers Weekly)
