JIM FISK (310 pp.)W. A Swanberg Scribner ($4.50).
No one has bettered the New York Times's description of James Fisk Jr.: "First in war, first in peace and first in the pockets of his countrymen." Financier Fisk sacrificed the flower of his youth to selling mildewed blankets to the Union Army and smuggling Confederate cotton into the mills of his native Vermont. When peace came, he was rich enough to buy a directorship in the Erie Railroadand so accelerated the decay of that calamitous line that Erie passengers felt safer "going over Niagara in...
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