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When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age
by: Justin Kaplan

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Collectible Price: $24.95
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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
Sales Rank: 57077
Studio: Viking Adult

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Product Description:
In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan—Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Mark Twain—vividly 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: out of 5 stars

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- 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 articulate. Unfortunately the book doesn't really have any focus. The principal figures in this book, the third generation cousins William and John Jacob Astor, led interesting and diverse lives. Unfortunately the book is not a biography, several of which exist and are sources, but is presented as centering on the hotel interests of the Astors. I doubt that even a quarter of the book, short as it is, has anything to do ... 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 with quotations from other writers, in the manner of an undergraduate term paper; and worst of all, for a book that is so heavily researched, there is not a single endnote--a reader searching for the source of any one of those quotations is doomed to frustration. Don't waste your time on this one.

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 of the Astor male line, with a lengthy interruption to elaborate on the life of Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, wife of William Backhouse Astor, Jr., who successfully positioned herself as grande dame of New York society. The main focus of the book, however, is the rivalry between cousins William Waldorf and John Jacob Astor IV and their competition to build New York City's largest and grandest hotel.

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