An exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) biography of an oligarchic, reticent banker who became an admired Treasury secretary, until the Great Depression turned the tables on the socioeconomic assumptions he had lived by. Mellon, whose father was an austere, Scotch-Irish magnate of western Pennsylvania, grew very wealthy by financing vertical businesses in heavy industries as well as banking. Mellon fils expanded into chemicals, electricity, and oil, extending the Judge’s model. He was, however, emotionally stunted and his marriage a disaster. In Washington, he should have left after the end of the Coolidge administration (his second); not only did the Hoover era end badly, but Roosevelt deliberately pressed trumped-up (and sensationally dismissed) tax fraud charges. Notwithstanding, Mellon saw fit to donate the whole of his grand art collection as well as build the National Gallery to his country (and adopted city). Fine scholarship.