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When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 647.94097471
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: June 01, 2006
Publisher: Viking Adult
Studio: Viking Adult
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Editorial Review:
In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin KaplanPulitzer Prizewinning biographer of Mark Twainvividly brings to life a glittering, bygone age. Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior. Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural appreciation, and pure reading pleasure.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Bookseller for When the Astors Owned NY
This bookseller is very good. I received my book promptly and in perfect condition as promised.. I would do business with them again.
Rating:  - Writers versus historians
The author of this book, Justin Kaplan, is clearly more a writer than a historian. Personally I felt that this relatively short book (180 pages) was quite readable and got through it in one sitting. However, at the end, I was left scratching my head as to what was the purpose of the book. Essentially the author has read a number of Astor biographies and simply did a non-academic rewrite. I suppose its like a trashy Hollywood biography based on movie magazine articles but written by someone far more ... Read More
Rating:  - Boring!
My, this is a dull book! Justin Kaplan may be one of the darlings of an elder generation of the literary-academic set, but he doesn't have the least idea how to write prose that will grab and keep the attention of an ordinary reader. While the book is full of details of the era he's writing about (New York in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries), those details are invariably presented as a catalogue rather than in a way that brings pictures to the reader's mind. Kaplan's paragraphs are laden ... Read More
Rating:  - An entertaining history of the Astors and New York's elite
Justin Kaplan, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of "Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain" has recently published a work of entertaining history. "When the Astors Owned New York" offers readers a voyeuristic look into the lives of New York City's high society during the Gilded Age, a society in which the Astor family remained at the pinnacle for many decades. It begins with an account of the life of the founding father of this American dynasty, John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), and progresses through five generations ... Read More
Rating: - Excellent introduction to "the 400", the Astors, and the rise of the grand hotels
This book is an excellent introduction to the history of "the 400" (or "the Four Hundred") and the Astor family for the many people who seek such information. Many people ask me for more information about "the 400" because my novel, "Chasing the 400", deals with the African American community's social interpretation of "the 400" during the 1950's. At that time, "the 400" was a term that was used to characterize the Black Bourgeoisie, the same as the term was used to characterize the New York Gilded Age social ... Read More
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