内容简介
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.