Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
Ultimate Folly - The Rises and Falls of Whitaker Wright - cover

Ultimate Folly - The Rises and Falls of Whitaker Wright

Henry Macrory

Publisher: Biteback Publishing

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

A gripping story of greed, treachery and ruthless ambition.
Few people have led such an extraordinary life as Whitaker Wright. Few have died in such sensational circumstances. Beginning his career as an impoverished preacher, Wright crossed the Atlantic to prospect for gold, surviving a Native American massacre before he made his fortune. Then the bubble burst. Leaving behind a string of angry investors, he fled to England to start again. Soon he was one of the world's richest men.
At his 10,000-acre estate in Surrey, he employed an entourage of seventy-seven staff, moved a hill that blocked his view and built an underwater glass smoking room. On his vast steam yacht, he entertained the Prince of Wales, the Kaiser and half of Britain's aristocracy.
His downfall was as dramatic as his ascent. On the last trading day of the nineteenth century, his financial empire – which he had propped up by cooking the books – went belly up. This time, the trail of furious investors stretched all the way to the Prime Minister. With the police in hot pursuit, Wright fled to New York, but his escape was short-lived. At the end of what the press dubbed 'the most dramatic trial of modern times' he was sentenced to seven years in jail. Minutes later, he sprang a last dreadful surprise...
Other great swindlers have followed in Wright's footsteps, but none have surpassed him in daring and shamelessness. Drawing on family papers and archives from around the world, this compelling account of Wright's life reads like a thriller and offers an insight into the mind of the ultimate gambler and conman.
Available since: 06/12/2018.
Print length: 356 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • Truman Capote - A Literary Life at the Movies - cover

    Truman Capote - A Literary Life...

    Tison Pugh

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The author of Queer Chivalry presents a biographical study of the celebrity writer “rich with insight into [his] literary and cinematic achievements” (Publishers Weekly).   Truman Capote’s legacy is in many ways defined by his complex relationship with Hollywood. In Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies, Tison Pugh explores the author and his literature through a cinematic lens, weaving elements of Capote’s biography—including his flamboyant public persona and his friendships and feuds with notable stars—with critical analysis of the films, screenplays, and adaptations of his works. Capote’s masterful prose made him an iconic twentieth century author, and his screenplays, including Beat the Devil, Indiscretion of an American Wife, and The Innocents, allowed him to collaborate with such Hollywood heavyweights as Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, and David O. Selznick. But the beloved and acclaimed adaptations of his literature, most notably Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, undercut his daring treatment of homosexuality in favor of heterosexual romance. Pugh demonstrates how Capote’s gay southern identity influenced perceptions of his literature and its adaptations. Illuminating Capote’s successes and disappointments in the film industry, Pugh delivers a revealing and nuanced portrait of the author’s literary life.
    Show book
  • Bitter Blood - A True Story of Southern Family Pride Madness and Multiple Murder - cover

    Bitter Blood - A True Story of...

    Jerry Bledsoe

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The “riveting” #1 New York Times bestseller: A true story of three wealthy families and the unbreakable ties of blood (Kirkus Reviews).   The first bodies found were those of a feisty millionaire widow and her daughter in their posh Louisville, Kentucky, home. Months later, another wealthy widow and her prominent son and daughter-in-law were found savagely slain in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mystified police first suspected a professional in the bizarre gangland-style killings that shattered the quiet tranquility of two well-to-do southern communities. But soon a suspicion grew that turned their focus to family.   The Sharps. The Newsoms. The Lynches. The only link between the three families was a beautiful, aristocratic young mother named Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch. Could this former child “princess” and fraternity sweetheart have committed such barbarous crimes? And what about her gun-loving first cousin and lover, Fritz Klenner, son of a nationally renowned doctor?   In this tale of three families connected by marriage and murder, of obsessive love and bitter custody battles, Jerry Bledsoe recounts the shocking events that ultimately took nine lives, building to a truly horrifying climax that will leave you stunned.   “Recreates . . . one of the most shocking crimes of recent years.” —Publishers Weekly   “Absorbing suspense.” —Chicago Tribune   “Astonishing . . . Brilliantly chronicled.” —Detroit Free Press   “An engrossing southern gothic sure to delight fans of the true-crime genre. Bledsoe maintains the suspense with a sure hand.” —The Charlotte Observer
    Show book
  • Heretic - A Memoir - cover

    Heretic - A Memoir

    Jeanna Kadlec

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A memoir of leaving the evangelical church and the search for radical new ways to build community.  
     Jeanna Kadlec knew what it meant to be faithful--in her marriage to a pastor’s son, in the comfortable life ahead of her, in her God--but there was no denying the truth that lived under that conviction: she was queer and, if she wanted to survive, she would need to leave behind the church and every foundational building block she knew.   
     Heretic is a memoir of rebirth. Within, Kadlec reckons with religious trauma and Midwestern values, as a means of unveiling how evangelicalism directly impacts every American--religious or not--and has been a major force in driving our democracy towards fascism. From the story of Lilith to celebrity purity rings, Kadlec interrogates how her indoctrination and years of piety intersects with her Midwest working-class upbringing. As she navigated graduate school, a new home on the East Coast, and a new marriage, another insidious truth began to reveal itself --that conservative Christianity has both built and undermined our political power structures, poisoned our pop culture, and infected how we interact with one another in ways that the secular population couldn’t see.   
     Weaving the personal with powerful critique, Heretic explores how we can radically abandon these painful systems by taking a sledgehammer to the comfortable. Whether searching for community in the face of millennial loneliness or wanting to reclaim a secular form of fellowship in everyday life, Kadlec envisions the brilliant possibilities that come with not only daring to want a different way but actually striking out and claiming it for ourselves.
    Show book
  • Boys Will Be Boys - A Daughter's Elegy - cover

    Boys Will Be Boys - A Daughter's...

    Sara Suleri Goodyear

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    “A daughter’s nostalgic tribute to her father . . . an intimate account of the socio-cultural fabric of the postcolonial world of Pakistan.” —Dr. Jharna Malaviya, Research Journal of English Language and Literature 
     
    Sara Suleri Goodyear’s Meatless Days is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his “patriotic and preposterous” disposition). 
     
    Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear’s upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also “preposterous . . . counting himself king of infinite space,” a man who imposed outrageously on his children.  
     
    Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. “On Judgment Day,” he told his daughter, “I will say to God, ‘Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.’”
    Show book
  • The Combat Zone - Murder Race and Boston's Struggle for Justice - cover

    The Combat Zone - Murder Race...

    Jan Brogan

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    At the end of the 1976 football season, more than forty Harvard athletes went to Boston's Combat Zone to celebrate. In the city's adult entertainment district, drugs and prostitution ran rampant, violent crime was commonplace, and corrupt police turned the other way. At the end of the night, Italian American star athlete Andy Puopolo, raised in the city's North End, was murdered in a stabbing. Three African American men were accused of the crime. His murder made national news and led to the eventual demise of the city's red-light district.Starting with this brutal murder, The Combat Zone tells the story of the Puopolo family's struggle with both a devastating loss and a criminal justice system that produced two trials with opposing verdicts, all within the context of a racially divided Boston. Brogan traces the contentious relationship between Boston's segregated neighborhoods during the busing crisis; shines a light on a court system that allowed lawyers to strike potential jurors based purely on their racial or ethnic identity; and lays bare the deep-seated corruption within the police department and throughout the Combat Zone. What emerges is a fascinating snapshot of the city at a transitional moment in its recent past.
    Show book
  • Little Known Facts: Edie Falco - Interview With Edie Falco - cover

    Little Known Facts: Edie Falco -...

    Ilana Levine

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Edie Falco, the multi award winning actress, takes Ilana through her life and career in exquisite detail. From her early days waitressing to her early indie films. How she got the role of Carmela on "The Sopranos," the script she originally read for "Nurse Jackie." Ilana and Edie talk about sobriety, adoption, fame, single motherhood, pet psychics, and much more on this fascinating episode of "Little Known Facts."Edie Falco's acting career began with her work in indie films: The Unbelievable Truth , Laws of Gravity and Trust. In 1999, she had two starring roles, in Judy Berlin and Random Hearts, her first major role in a mainstream film. She was  cast in roles on the television shows Homicide, Life On The Street and Oz  both created by Tom Fontana.  She became a household name when she landed her star-making role as Mafia wife Carmela in HBO's The Sopranos. When that show ended, she nabbed the title role in Showtime's Nurse Jackie and then she played Louis C.K.'s sister on Horace and Pete. She will also portray attorney Leslie Abramson, the attorney best known for her legal defense of Erik Menendez in the mini series Law and Order : True Crime.  Raised on Long Island Edie now lives in New York City with her children and is an advocate for animal rights. Little Known Fact: She auditioned and got the role of Carmela Soprano all within 24 hours.
    Show book