Though reviled for more than a century as Wall Street's greatest villain, Jay Gould was in fact its most original creative genius. Gould was the robber baron's robber baron, the most astute financial and business strategist of his time and also the most widely hated. In Dark Genius of Wall Street, acclaimed biographer Edward J. Renehan, Jr., combines lively anecdotes with the rich social tapestry of the Gilded Age to paint the portrait of the most talented financial buccaneer of his generation -- and one of the inventors of modern business.

Jay Gould was the robber baron's robber baron: the greatest financial and business genius of his time and also the most widely hated. He could go head-to-head with the likes of J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the U.S. Treasury and almost always outsmart them. Gould was the undisputed master of the nation's railroads and telegraph systems at a time when these were the fastest-growing new technologies of the age. His scheme to corner the gold market in 1869 caused the Black Friday panic. He created new ways of manipulating markets, assembling capital and swallowing his competitors. Many of these methods are now standard practice; others were unique to their circumstances and unrepeatable; others were among the first practices prohibited by the SEC when it came into being in the 1930s.Acclaimed biographer Edward J. Renehan, Jr., recounts the dazzling life story of a figure whose stature in his era outranks that of Bill Gates, in a time when a “corporate takeover battle” was literally a battle, involving not just lawyers and bankers but the buying and selling of judges and occasional confrontations between gangs of armed thugs. Renehan combines lively anecdotes with the rich social tapestry of the Gilded Age to create the first balanced biography of a man who was undoubtedly the greatest financial genius of his age—and one of the inventors of modern business.

Roger Ailes, former Republican political consultant, and current president of Fox News Channel, is a dominant media figure of our age. His made-for-TV imagery and mastery of “style over substance” has overtaken earlier methods of reporting the news, and radically refashioned our political and communications landscapes. Yet, no book has ever been published on this Oz-like figure: Dark Genius is the definitive study of Ailes and his controversial career. The 1960 television encounter between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy was the moment when slick television imagery began to take over politics. Ailes, a young TV producer, absorbed the lessons of the new video age, and put them into practice. While a director on “The Mike Douglas Show”, he met Richard Nixon, who soon hired Ailes to help him conquer the fledgling medium. Riding the wave of that triumph, Ailes went on to aid other key Republican figures like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Rudy Giuliani. In the 1990s, Ailes was hired to run CNBC, the first cable financial network, bringing a talk radio sensibility to the small screen. Then, Rupert Murdoch hired him to implement the media mogul’s vision for a different kind of cable news network. Now, with Murdoch (whose News Corp. has recently acquired the Wall Street Journal), Ailes is launching the FOX News business channel in 2007. Over the span of several decades, Ailes has played a key role in the growing reach of conservatism, first in politics, then in mass media. Part history, part media criticism, part current events, Dark Genius tracks the rise, dominance, and relevance of political television, and how it has been used and abused by its master.

Jay Gould was an individual who for a century has been singled out as the most unscrupulous of the turn-of-the-century robber barons. In this splendid biography Maury Klein paints the most complete portrait of the notorious Gould ever written. Klein's Gould is a brilliant but ruthless businessman who merged dying railroads into expansive, profit-making lines, including the giant Union Pacific. 40 illustrations.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids waiting at home and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king, here, in Jordan Belfort’s own words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called the Wolf of Wall Street. In the 1990s, Belfort became one of the most infamous kingpins in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. It’s an extraordinary story of greed, power, and excess that no one could invent: the tale of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices to making hundreds of millions—until it all came crashing down. Praise for The Wolf of Wall Street “Raw and frequently hilarious.”—The New York Times “A rollicking tale of [Jordan Belfort’s] rise to riches as head of the infamous boiler room Stratton Oakmont . . . proof that there are indeed second acts in American lives.”—Forbes “A cross between Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Scorsese’s GoodFellas . . . Belfort has the Midas touch.”—The Sunday Times (London) “Entertaining as pulp fiction, real as a federal indictment . . . a hell of a read.”—Kirkus Reviews

When Jay Gould died in 1892 he left behind an estate worth the equivalent of seventy-eight billion in today's dollars. He also left behind a reputation as one of Wall Street's most shrewd, astute, and (some said) manipulative operators. Long before his adventures in finance, the future "robber baron" was a young man on the make in his native Catskills, working as a surveyor and mapmaker in his natal place of Delaware County, where he had grown up side by side with the future writer and naturalist John Burroughs. Originally published in 1856, when Gould was just twenty, Gould's History of Delaware County and Border Wars of New York is based on primary sources and original testimony from second and third generation settlers, many of them Gould's own friends and cousins. The book continues to be an important source on the first settlement of the region and is highly regarded by scholars. This edition features a new introduction by Edward Renehan, the biographer of both Gould and John Burroughs.

Cramer takes readers on a no-holds-barred tour of life on Wall Street--revealing how the game is played, who breaks the rules, and who gets hurt.