Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir by Wendy Burden (Gotham Books)
Opening lines of books we want to read:
It's a testament to his libido, if not his character, that Cornelius Vanderbilt died of syphilis instead of apoplexy.
In 1794, a few miles from where his powdered bones eternally lie, within the eight-foot-thick walls of the largest tomb ever built in America, the origin of my family's fortune was born into what would prove to be a very material world. As the sixth of nine children, Cornelius was expected to pull his weight. At eleven he had dropped out of school, and at sixteen he was piloting his own small ferryboat. At nineteen he married his cousin Sophia Jackson (an act of consanguinity that arguably heralded the start of our genetic troubles) and set about fathering the first of thirteen children. By twenty-one the Vanderbilt name was on several schooners, and by thirty-five Cornelius has earned the sobriquet of commodore and controlled a network of steamboat routes that traveled up and down the East Coast. At seventy he had the wherewithal to switch from steamships to railroads. And at seventy-five he eloped to Canada to marry a thirty-one-year old woman named Frank.--Selected by Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness
