Captains and the Kings: A Novel About an American Dynasty

Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1972. Book Club (BCE/BOMC). Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. 8x5x1. Book club edition. Jacket a bit toned, minor wear to corners. 1972 Hard Cover. 637 pp. "This is a great surging novel about the amassing of a colossal fortune, the political power that comes with it, and the operation of a curse laid on an Irish-American dynasty and the ruthless, driving man who founded it. Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh was twelve years old when he first saw America through a dirty porthole on the steerage deck of The Irish Queen. It was the early 1850s and he was a penniless immigrant and orphan cast on a hostile shore to make a home for himself and his younger brother and infant sister. Some seventy years later, from his deathbed, Joseph Armagh last glimpsed his adopted land from the gleaming windows of a palatial estate. A multi-millionaire, one of the most powerful and feared of men, Joseph Armagh had indeed found a home. Captains and the Kings is the story of the price that was paid for it in the consuming, single-minded determination of a man clawing his way to the top; in the bittersweet bliss of the love of a beautiful woman; in the almost-too-late enjoyment of extraordinary children; and in a curse which uses the hand of fate to strike in the very face of success itself. Once again, Taylor Caldwell has looked into America's roistering past as a setting for a drama of the consequences of savage ambition -- and its meaning then and now." "Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell (September 7, 1900 - August 30, 1985) was an Anglo-American novelist and prolific author of popular fiction, also known by the pen names Marcus Holland and Max Reiner, and by her married name of J. Miriam Reback. In her fiction, she often used real historical events or persons. Taylor Caldwell's best-known works include Dynasty of Death, Dear and Glorious Physician (about Saint Luke), and Captains and the Kings. Her last major novel, Answer as a Man, appeared in 1980.