Mellon: An American Life by David Cannadine. By the time Andrew Mellon became Harding’s Treasury Secretary in 1921, he was the third largest taxpayer in the United States, behind only the senior Rockefeller and Henry Ford. He achieved this distinction by being the greatest venture capitalist of his era, having seeded (among other enterprises) Alcoa, Koppers, Carborundum and Gulf Oil. Mellon was Coolidge’s partner in the great wave of tax-rate cutting and budget balancing of the 1920s, and personally endowed the National Gallery of Art even as FDR’s myrmidons were trying to hound him into prison. This is a great book about an astonishing and all but forgotten life.