"The story of the Astors is an extraordinary but true tale of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention -- and of cunning, determination, hard work, hubris, infighting, and greed. One of the wealthiest men to have ever lived, John Jacob Astor first arrived in New York in 1783 and built a fortune through a ruthless expansion of his beaver trapping business, which he grew into an empire through real estate that enriched him at the expense of...

The Three Roosevelts is the extraordinary political biography of the intertwining lives of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who emerged from the closed society of New York's Knickerbocker elite to become the most prominent American political family of the twentieth century. As Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author James MacGregor Burns and acclaimed historian Susan Dunn follow the evolution of the Roosevelt political philosophy,...

Presents an account of the experiences of the historical ship's wealthy and famous passengers and their world, drawing on original research to place their lives within an arc of the Titanic's dramatic demise, explaining how their stories reflect key tenets of the Edwardian era.

An American aristocrat--a descendant of founding father John Jay--Susan Mary Alsop (1918-2004) knew absolutely everyone and brought together the movers and shakers of not just the United States, but the world. Henry Kissinger remarked that more agreements were concluded in her living room than in the White House. In 1945 Susan Mary joined her first husband, a young diplomat, in Paris, where she was at the center of the postwar diplomatic social circuit,...