Marriages of mutual benefit made 42 American princesses, 17 duchesses and 136 countesses.
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 , by Sven Beckert. Cambridge University Press, 492 pages, $34.95.
The French banking scion Salomon Rothschild, visiting New York in 1860, predicted inaccurately but insightfully that within Read More
The New Gilded Age: ‘The New Yorker’ Looks at the Culture of Affluence. Edited by David Remnick. Random House, 432 pages, $26.95.
When did we lose the 1990′s? I’m not niggling about the change of millennium and all that. I’m talking about the decade-that- almost-was, that quaint and earnest America of, say, the first winter Read More
Alfred A. Schmidt Delivered , by Louis Begley. Knopf, 292 pages, $25.
In his masterly 1996 novel About Schmidt , Louis Begley traced a narrative whose outline could have come straight from Austen or Trollope. The book began with an old family house in danger of being sold, a distressing luncheon invitation and the threat Read More
Gone: The Last Days of ‘The New Yorker’ , by Renata Adler. Simon & Schuster, 252 pages, $25.
Come sit for a moment, prop your chin on your hand and gaze–like Gibbon regarding the grandeur that was Rome–upon the ivy-covered ruins of the noble New Yorker . Here and there among the shapeless hummocks Read More
Gore Vidal: A Biography , by Fred Kaplan. Doubleday, 850 pages, $35.
Ah, to have been Gore Vidal! The blond princeling in 1930′s Washington, the postwar prodigy, boozing and cruising with Tennessee and Truman, Christopher Isherwood and Paul Bowles; the double-edged sexual swordsman, slaying youths and maidens with seigniorial hauteur; the heavyweight author, trading blows Read More
