About this item
In real estate-obsessed New York, no new building has captured the city's imagination - or as many of its richest residents - as Fifteen Central Park West. In House of Outrageous Fortune, America's foremost chronicler of the upper crust, journalist and bestselling author Michael Gross, turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that's sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross creates a dishy expos of today's wealthiest and most famous. This colorful story recounts the recordsetting building's inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially dclass Manhattan neighborhood. With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, and penthouses that cost almost $100 million, Fifteen is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century.
About the Author
This book list is a work in progress. Michael Gross is recognized as one of America's most provocative writers of non-fiction-its "foremost chronicler of the upper-crust," says curbed. com. His latest book Unreal Estate, to be published November 1, 2011, is a west coast version of his bestseller, 740 Park, this time exposing the most exclusive neighborhoods of Los Angeles-Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel Air and Beverly Park-and their residents. 740 Park, published in 2005, is the inside story of New York's richest, most prestigious cooperative apartment building. Built by James T. Lee, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' grandfather, and long the residence of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , 740 Park is today the home of some of New York's wealthiest and most prominent families. Fortune has described 740 Park as "jaw-dropping apartment porn. " It offers an unprecedented peek into the world of such latterday financial heroes and villains as Stephen Schwarzman, Ezra Merkin and John Thain. In between these real estate epics, Gross published the wildly controversial expose of New York's cultural elite Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum in 2009, setting off an extraordinary campaign by some of New York's most influential citizens to suppress the book. It failed. The New York Times Book Review called it "a blockbuster exhibition of human achievement and flaws" and Vanity Fair said it is simply "explosive. " Why? "Gross demonstrates he knows his stuff. It's a terrific tale ... gossipy, color-rich, fact-packed ... What Gross reveals is stuff that more people should know," according to USA Today. A paperback edition was released in May 2010. Before 740 Park, Gross wrote Genuine Authentic, a biography of fashion designer Ralph Lauren. It was acclaimed by The New York Times as a work of "impressive reporting" that "hack(s) through the hype and half-truths" of the Polo purveyor's legend. Publishers Weekly praised his "meticulous research and artful prose ... The crackerjack journalist simultaneously tells a compelling story and gives it meat enough to be satisfying."A Contributing Editor of Travel & Leisure, Gross has also worked as a columnist for The New York Times, GQ, Tatler, Town & Country, and The Daily News; a Contributing Editor of New York (where he wrote 26 cover stories, including the magazine's all-time best-selling reported cover story on John F. Kennedy, Jr.) , and of Talk; a Senior Writer at Esquire, and a Senior Editor at George.In 2000, Gross published My Generation, a generational biography of the Baby Boom. It was called "wonderful" by the Washington Times, "trenchant, well-dramatized, thought-provoking and unusual" by Kirkus Reviews and "hugely entertaining ... a brilliantly reported story," by the Orlando Sentinel.Gross's 199
