Thanks to Jocelyn of Kelley & Hall Book Publicity, I am giving away 3 copies of Commodore.

Book Description:

As a poor Staten Island farm boy Cornelius Vanderbilt would watch the ships come from all over the world to Manhattan. He knew the name of every ship. His illiterate father scoffed at his dreamy ways. By 16 the bitterness between them had grown to the point that Cornelius wanted out. He planned to sign up for an ocean going ship. . Instead his mother offered $100 for a used sailboat he had seen. He brought people to Manhattan, earning enough to repay his mother tenfold in a year.

Asked by a Knickerbocker gentleman about his 5th grade education, Vanderbilt shot back, “If I had learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else.” Fair enough- contained by a fine education, bottled into a well spoken somewhat scholarly persona, might have killed the golden goose, the source of his power, his shrewd rarely resting mind.

He could seem the ignoramus, squawking at the fancy folk, spitting into a spittoon or on the ground, as a young man among the other longshoremen.

At 19 others thought he was at the top of his game, the owner of three schooners, his reward for daring during the War of 1812. Using his $100 sailboat to bring supplies to the American forts, he thought little of the danger from the British navy. What he cared about was the incredible money being offered. By the end of the war he could marry his first cousin Sophia from the next farm. With his schooners he could comfortably support a family.

Sophia was soon disappointed. He sold them all. He told her he saw the future. It was those clanking monster boats, spewing fire and ashes, which were beginning to appear on the Hudson. Steamboats. He got a job working as captain on a small steamboat in New Jersey, earning a fraction of what he had made with his schooners. His boss owned a run down tavern, at the end of a dock in New Brunswick, where his steam boat stopped. The place smelled like cat piss and beer vomit. He and Sophie, turned it into Belonna, a comfortable, decent inn where travelers spent the night on the way to Philadelphia. With one of her 12 children on her teat, each child became hard working assistants. It took them 10 years to save enough for their first, then ten more years for the Vanderbilts to own 100 steamboats.

He took the first vacation of his life at 60. He had passed Astor to become the richest man in America. He built the North Star, a yacht, said to be more lavish than the Queen of England’s royal yacht. His triumphant tour of the European capitals was widely reported all over America. The USA was hardly sixty years in existence. Here is a comment from the New York Herald. “The sovereigns of Europe have looked upon our increasing power with mingled surprise and alarm–surprise at our progress, and alarm lest the lesson it silently inculcates might be learned by their own oppressed subjects.” The Scientific American weighed in, “Queen Victoria, Czar Nicholas of Russia and Napolean III will get some of their conceit knocked out of them by a private citizen of New York.”

Who can resist a super hero? They address what we are lacking, provide us with joyous triumphs and power–at least while the movie plays. 
The Commodore would quickly interrupt. “I ain’t no hero.” And most certainly he wasn’t, but if one goes to Grand Central Station on Vanderbilt Avenue in New York and enters the spirit of the place, Vanderbilt’s magnificent castle in his hometown, dedicated to his true love, business and enterprise, one might not see a superhero, but certainly this man had an awfully long and good run. 

People couldn’t get enough of him in their newspapers. One of their own showed ’em it can get done. One of ’em that wouldn’t take nothing from no one. The American dream may be a cliche, but to them that lived it, to the millions who came on a boat with little but the clothes they could carry, Vanderbilt’s story is what brought them here. He was their hero in the land of opportunity. A superhero (with the blemishes of a real person)

About Simon Sobo:

Simon Sobo has excited the praise of a wide variety of writers, Anna Freud, Pauline Kael, Scott Peck, and Lauren Slater for his astute, non-fiction, literary and psychiatric articles. Amongst others his writing has appeared in Yale Review, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Psychiatric Times, Medical Hypothesis, as well as chapters in anthologies such as ADHD Revisited. He is also author of The Fear of Death, a conversation with Freud.

He has always been drawn to a good story, particularly fascinated by people with soaring hopes and the drive to see them fulfilled. So when the compelling facts of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s life, his pathetic beginnings and extraordinary triumphs, grabbed his attention, Commodore was half written. Who can resist a super hero? They address what we are lacking, provide us with triumph and power–at least while the movie plays. The Commodore would quickly interrupt if he were around. “I ain’t no hero.” And most certainly he wasn’t, but if one goes to Grand Central Station on Vanderbilt Avenue in New York, and yields to the spirit of the place, Vanderbilt’s final big project, his magnificent castle in his hometown, dedicated to his true love, business and enterprise, one might not see a superhero, but certainly this man had an awfully long and good run. He was the Michael Jordan of his day.

He did not know how to quit. He refused to not win. People couldn’t get enough of him in the newspapers One of their own showed ’em it can get done. One of ’em that spit and cursed and wouldn’t take nothing from no one. And managed to keep it going and going. The difference between him and a sports here is that he kept it going well into his eighties. The American dream may be a cliche, but to them that lived it, to the millions who came on a boat with little but the clothes they could carry, Vanderbilt’s story is what brought them here. He was their hero in the land of opportunity. A superhero (with the blemishes of a real person). 

Sobo feels he should have been writing fiction all along. Vanderbilt allowed him a voice that he didn’t know existed. Approaching 70 Sobo is now convinced that there will be many more to come.

This giveaway is open to U.S. residents only and ends on November 29, 2013.  Please use Rafflecopter to enter.
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