Blue Blood and Mutiny:
The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley

Blood Blood & Mutiny is the first and only book written about the venerable Wall Street firm established in 1935. Morgan Stanley valued its privacy so strictly that even when the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ron Chernow wrote The House of Morgan, the chairman of Morgan Stanley refused to be interviewed, and instructed every employee of the firm to follow his lead. In 2005, that same man, now the former chairman, along with the former president of Morgan Stanley and six other retired senior executives mounted a fight to force the board to fire Philip Purcell, the firm’s chairman and CEO…

After The Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party that Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905

After The Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall St. Scandal of 1905

James Hazen Hyde’s story takes place in the American Gilded Age, the period between the late 1800s and World War I when great fortunes were made and the newly rich delighted in displaying their wealth. James was in his early twenties when his father died, far too young to have inherited the power over a major company, The Equitable Life Assurance Society.

In the midst of Gilded Age splendor, he stood out as an example of excessive glamour, which led to his humiliating defeat at the hands of…

Newsmaker: Roy W. Howard the Mastermind Behind the Scripps‑Howard News Empire from the Gilded Age to the Atomic Age

In the first half of the 20th century, the golden age of newspapers, the colorful, charismatic Roy W. Howard was chairman of Scripps-Howard, one of the two most important newspaper empires in the United States. The only American newspaperman who was simultaneously a publisher, editor and journalist, Howard was one of the most famous men of his era: selfmade, ambitious, powerful, controversial, and the advisor to every president from Woodrow Wilson to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Newsmaker is based on Beard’s exclusive access to fifty years of Howard’s privately-held diaries, and thousands of pages of his “Strictly Confidential” memoranda, a behind-the-scenes background to the history of the first half of the 20th Century, which divulges the secrets of some of the most important figures in a turbulent era.

Good Daughters: The Last Chapter

“What are we going to do about our mothers?” That was the question that inspired Beard to write Good Daughters: The Last Chapter. When Beard’s mother began to show the signs of age, she recognized that there was a need for a book that addressed how adult daughters can make peace with their mothers, what it means to be a good daughter of an elderly mother, and how to face the time when a daughter can never hear her mother’s voice on the phone again. In stories gathered from hundreds of women, Good Daughters approaches the practical and emotional issues that confront mothers and daughters who face change and loss with courage, compassion, and the desire to develop stronger relationships before it is too late.

A Certain Summer: A Novel

A Certain Summer, Patricia Beard’s first novel, is set in 1948 in “Wauregan,” an idyllic island colony off the shores of Long Island, where the myth and the mystique is that “nothing ever changes here,” the comforting tradition that its summer dwellers have lived by for a century. But in the aftermath of World War II, the time has come to deal with history’s indelible scars. Helen Wadsworth’s husband, Arthur, has been declared missing in action during an OSS action in France. She is raising a fourteen-year-old son, who longs to know the truth about his father. Helen turns to Frank Hartman, her husband’s best friend and partner, who has mysteriously returned from the mission when Arthur disappeared.