The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family

New York: Random House, 1993. First Edition. First Printing. Hard cover. Good/good. 25 cm, 820 pages, illus., bibliography, notes, index, some DJ soiling & edge wear, slightly shaken, ink initials inside front board, some edge wear. Ronald Chernow (born March 3, 1949) is an American writer, journalist, historian, and biographer. He has written bestselling and award-winning biographies of historical figures from the world of business, finance, and American politics. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2011 American History Book Prize for his 2010 book, Washington: A Life. He is also the recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his 1990 book, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. His biographies of Alexander Hamilton (2004) and John D. Rockefeller (1998) were both nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family, was honored with the 1993 George S. Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing. Derived from a Kirkus review: Drawing on unrestricted access to members of the extended family and their voluminous archives, Chernow offers a start-to- present chronicle. Tracing the line from the mid-16th century, he reviews how canon and secular law shunted the era's Jews into trade or moneylending. By 1773, the patriarch's descendants were able to settle in the thriving port of Hamburg, where they established themselves as world-class bankers. Tracking the varied fortunes of Warburgs through Bismarck's Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and beyond, Chernow documents how intermarriage with Our Crowd's Loebs and Schiffs enabled the Warburgs to make their mark on Wall Street. Paul M. Warburg was a driving force behind the Federal Reserve Board's 1913 creation. WW II drove Siegmund Warburg to London, where he became a power in The City. A lively, and definitive account of a clan whose star has waxed as that of its Rothschild rivals has waned.