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Sunny von Bülow was born Martha Sharp Crawford on September 1, 1931, in a private railway carriage rolling from Virginia toward New York. Her father, a utilities magnate, died when she was three, leaving his only child a reported $100 million. The nickname that stuck from childhood was Sunny, for her warm and easy temperament, … Read more

Jeg hedder Camille Hartley. I toogtyve år tjente jeg som cyberefterretningsofficer i det amerikanske forsvarsministerium. Jeg har været på tophemmelige missioner og opereret i mørke datazoner, som de fleste aldrig får at vide eksisterer. Men ingen lærte mig nogensinde, hvordan man overlever, når det er ens egen familie, der vender sig imod en. Den dag … Read more

Le verre de champagne s’écrasa sur le parquet avec une violence telle que toute la terrasse, aussi vaste qu’une salle de bal, se tut. Pas simplement le silence. Le genre de silence qui ne survient que lorsque quelque chose de profondément inattendu déchire l’atmosphère. Une seconde plus tôt, mon cousin Franck riait si fort qu’il … Read more

The young German sergeant stared at the long tables laid out with real plates, real forks, and real cups, and he could think only one thing: they are going to shoot us. This is our last meal. He had been told that America was a ruined country, that its farms had turned to desert, and … Read more

On the morning of Tuesday, March 20, 1923, a grocer from Memphis brought the New York Stock Exchange to its knees. Clarence Saunders had done what no outsider was supposed to do: he had quietly bought up nearly every share of his own company, Piggly Wiggly, and now the men who had bet against him … Read more

The Hyatt name has adorned hotels for decades, but the family behind it built one of the largest fortunes in America while carefully keeping its own name off the doors. When Abram Pritsker died in Chicago in February 1986, at age ninety, his heirs told the Internal Revenue Service he had left about $25,000. Two … Read more

On the morning of August 30, 1983, the space shuttle Challenger roared off its launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, carrying a crew that would make history before it even cleared the tower. Aboard that flight was Guion Bluford, a forty-year-old Air Force officer and aerospace engineer, and as the shuttle climbed into the Florida … Read more

Gerd von Rundstedt had outlived Germany’s empire, its republic, and its Nazi dictatorship. In the spring of 1949, the elderly field marshal walked out of British captivity and returned to Hanover, the same city where his only son had died of cancer little more than a year before. The Allies had charged him with war … Read more

In the autumn of 1944, Private First Class Martin Reeves was a 22-year-old clerk from Indianapolis, Indiana, assigned to fuel allocation records for General George S. Patton’s Third Army. He had been in the role for six months, checking ledgers with the same discipline his father, an accountant, had taught him. Numbers, his father always … Read more

On Christmas evening in 2007, in a Bel Air house, three generations of the Hilton family gathered around the tree. The patriarch, 80-year-old Barron Hilton, told them what would become of his money. His personal fortune stood at an estimated $2. 3 billion. Ninety-seven percent of it was going to charity. The remaining 3% would … Read more