The life of John Work Garrett (1820–1884) exemplified the transition from generalized merchants and bankers to the developers of specialized production and distribution enterprises—an evolution that Glenn Porter and Harold C. Livesay so memorably described in Merchants and Manufacturers (1971). In the case of the Garrett family, the story began in 1839 when John and his brother Henry joined their father in the new partnership of Robert Garrett & Sons. The Garretts’ involvement in a wide range of wholesaling, retailing, shipping, and banking functions increased their reliance on transportation links with the Ohio River Valley. Robert Garrett was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), a company funded and controlled in almost equal measure by private investors and the city of Baltimore. By the late 1850s, however, he had become concerned that the railroad's public investors favored the commercial development of Baltimore at the expense of dividends to private investors. With the support of fellow investor Johns Hopkins, Robert Garrett first placed his son John on the B&O's board of directors (in 1855) and then orchestrated his rise to the presidency in 1858.

John Garrett, newly installed as B&O president, faced challenges almost immediately. The depression that began in 1857 depressed the railroad's earnings. The young Garrett began a lifelong pattern of dubious accounting practices, which he believed necessary to boost dividends and restore investor confidence. As a Southern sympathizer and a slaveholder, Garrett had his loyalty to the Union tested by the secession crisis. He ultimately placed profits and pragmatism ahead of patriotism, however, as soon as he judged that the B&O's economic ties were with the North and the Midwest rather than the South. Particularly after his friend and business associate Edwin Stanton became secretary of war in January 1862, Garrett ensured that the B&O was indispensable to the Union military effort. The railroad suffered accordingly, as Confederate forces repeatedly tore up track, burned bridges, and confiscated equipment.

For nearly two decades after the end of the Civil War, Garrett demonstrated strong if autocratic leadership, as well as a mercurial personality that in later years showed evidence of mental illness. He guided the company through interminable rate wars with the other eastern trunk lines, while imposing wage cuts that initiated the great railway strike of 1877. Far earlier than any of his contemporaries, he appreciated the value of public relations, hiring promoter Joseph G. Pangborn to burnish the railroad's image. Garrett also pushed through long-anticipated lines to Chicago and Pittsburgh and launched a project that would eventually bring the B&O to Greater New York.

By the 1880s, however, Garrett was losing control over both his company and his mental faculties. Much of his senior management team left the company, once it became clear that Garrett intended his son, Robert II, to serve as his successor. The close association of three generations of Garretts in the affairs of the B&O was by no means unique in the railroad industry, or in other aspects of American business—the Vanderbilts were equally influential in the development of the New York Central (NYC). As such, Kathleen Waters Sander's biographical account is a useful perspective on Alfred D. Chandler's generalization—in Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990)—that personal, family capitalism in Great Britain differed markedly from the managerial capitalism that characterized the United States. While William Henry Vanderbilt ably succeeded his father, Cornelius, as head of the NYC, the leadership of the B&O during the 1880s typified the dysfunctionality that Chandler has associated with family-run enterprises. Following John Garrett's death in 1884, Robert II became president. He was woefully unprepared for the task and held office only until 1887. The B&O went into receivership nine years later, crippled by the Garretts’ mismanagement during the 1880s, the enormous cost of the ill-advised New York extension, and the depression of the 1890s. The financial calamity destroyed John Garett's plans to keep ownership of the B&O in the family—which in any case soon descended into internecine squabbling—and even the family firm of Robert Garrett & Sons fell into the hands of outsiders.

In a well-researched and engagingly written volume, Sander has traced the rise—and fall—of the B&O through the career of its most influential president. Biographies of noted business leaders can often be either excessively laudatory or overly condemnatory, but Sander avoids each of those extremes. Nor does she focus on the details of John Garrett's personal and family life to the exclusion of broader trends in the history of American business during the nineteenth century. In both respects she offers more subtlety than Richard White's Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011), a book that heaps too much scorn on a small group of financiers while slighting the contributions of the legions of middle managers who were the ones who actually kept the trains running on time. Sander's biographical approach, moreover, makes her subject accessible to nonacademic audiences, and certainly suitable for an upper-level undergraduate class in business history. The book also fills an important niche in the historiography. John F. Stover's History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (1987) provides an excellent overview of the company, and James D. Dilts's The Great Road (1993) offers a superb, in-depth look at the political and professional context in which the railroad originated, yet neither volume fully discusses Garrett's problematic tenure. Garrett's career offers a valuable nineteenth-century counterpoint to a very different twentieth-century B&O president, one that David M. Vrooman described in Daniel Willard and Progressive Management on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (1991). As such, Sander's book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the development of transportation, business management, and corporate culture during the nineteenth century.