pickA Chernow tome. This biography isn‘t imaginative but it lays out an account, possibly exhaustive, of the U.S.‘s one time richest person. It explores John D Sr.‘s roots, including the roles of his bigamist peripatetic father and his stolidly Baptist mother; his gift for accounting and insistence on deriving value in every transaction; his conquering of the world‘s refined oil market; through to his early retirement and revolution in philanthropy.
pickWell Rockefeller was a mixed up guy. A lifelong baptist and devoted Christian, a skinflint who made his fortune by being a cartel operator and would be monopolist who drove competitors into bankruptcy by price manipulation, yet who in later life gave away the majority of his capital to charities. But what is even stranger is that Rockefeller seemed to never recognize the dissonance in his life holding both morality and immorality at the same time.
Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel.
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. | 
