House Of Outrageous Fortune

Author : Michael Gross
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451666217
Total Pages : 427 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book House of Outrageous Fortune written by Michael Gross and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Michael Gross’s new book…packs [in] almost as many stories as there are apartments in the building. The Jackie Collins of real estate likes to map expressions of power, money and ego… Even more crammed with billionaires and their exploits than 740 Park” (Penelope Green, The New York Times). 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, penthouses that cost almost $100 million, and a tenant roster that’s a roll call of business page heroes and villains, Fifteen Central Park West is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. In this “stunning” (CNN) and “deliciously detailed” (Booklist, starred review) New York Times bestseller, journalist 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 “takes another gossip-laden bite out of the upper crust” (Sam Roberts, The New York Times), whichincludes Denzel Washington, Sting, Norman Lear, top executives, and Russian and Chinese oligarchs, to name a few. And he recounts the legendary building’s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially déclassé Manhattan neighborhood. More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New York’s rich and famous—and is a bellwether of the city’s changing social and financial landscape.

Author : Michael Gross
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451666209
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book House of Outrageous Fortune written by Michael Gross and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of 740 Park presents a portrait of the nouveau-riche area of Central Park's southwest rim and how its high-profile, international residents are redefining the meaning of affluence in today's world.

Author : Michael Gross
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0767917448
Total Pages : 580 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book 740 Park written by Michael Gross and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-10-10 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of House of Outrageous Fortune For seventy-five years, it’s been Manhattan’s richest apartment building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world. One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only imagine, until now. The last great building to go up along New York’s Gold Coast, construction on 740 Park finished in 1930. Since then, 740 has been home to an ever-evolving cadre of our wealthiest and most powerful families, some of America’s (and the world’s) oldest money—the kind attached to names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier, Chrysler, Niarchos, Houghton, and Harkness—and some whose names evoke the excesses of today’s monied elite: Kravis, Koch, Bronfman, Perelman, Steinberg, and Schwarzman. All along, the building has housed titans of industry, political power brokers, international royalty, fabulous scam-artists, and even the lowest scoundrels. The book begins with the tumultuous story of the building’s construction. Conceived in the bubbling financial, artistic, and social cauldron of 1920’s Manhattan, 740 Park rose to its dizzying heights as the stock market plunged in 1929—the building was in dire financial straits before the first apartments were sold. The builders include the architectural genius Rosario Candela, the scheming businessman James T. Lee (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s grandfather), and a raft of financiers, many of whom were little more than white-collar crooks and grand-scale hustlers. Once finished, 740 became a magnet for the richest, oldest families in the country: the Brewsters, descendents of the leader of the Plymouth Colony; the socially-registered Bordens, Hoppins, Scovilles, Thornes, and Schermerhorns; and top executives of the Chase Bank, American Express, and U.S. Rubber. Outside the walls of 740 Park, these were the people shaping America culturally and economically. Within those walls, they were indulging in all of the Seven Deadly Sins. As the social climate evolved throughout the last century, so did 740 Park: after World War II, the building’s rulers eased their more restrictive policies and began allowing Jews (though not to this day African Americans) to reside within their hallowed walls. Nowadays, it is full to bursting with new money, people whose fortunes, though freshly-made, are large enough to buy their way in. At its core this book is a social history of the American rich, and how the locus of power and influence has shifted haltingly from old bloodlines to new money. But it’s also much more than that: filled with meaty, startling, often tragic stories of the people who lived behind 740’s walls, the book gives us an unprecedented access to worlds of wealth, privilege, and extraordinary folly that are usually hidden behind a scrim of money and influence. This is, truly, how the other half—or at least the other one hundredth of one percent—lives.

Author : Michael Gross
Publisher : Broadway
ISBN 13 : 076793265X
Total Pages : 562 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unreal Estate written by Michael Gross and published by Broadway. This book was released on 2011 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of lucrative real estate in Los Angeles shares the lesser-known contributions of a range of figures from Douglas Fairbanks and Marilyn Monroe to Howard Hughes and Ronald Reagan. By the best-selling author of Rogues' Gallery.

Author : Anthony Russell
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 1250031370
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Outrageous Fortune written by Anthony Russell and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his stunning memoir, Outrageous Fortune, Anthony Russell takes us inside his childhood growing up at Leeds Castle, with luxury and opulence few can imagine, and how he found his way in a changing society. "I was lucky with lineage. Money, and lots of it, appeared to grow on trees, especially those which adorned the Leeds Castle parkland. Ancestors with glowing titles and extraordinary accomplishments filled the history books, but there would be consequences for being handed everything of a material nature on a plate, with no clear indication of what one might be expected to do with such good fortune." Leeds Castle has long been hailed as the loveliest castle in the world. Originally built in the twelfth century as a Norman stronghold, the castle once housed Kings and Queens, but fell into disrepair for nearly a century, until Anthony Russell's grandmother, Lady Baillie, purchased it in 1926 and restored the fortress to its former glory. It was in the castle's fairytale setting, surrounded by a moat and acres of sprawling grounds, that Anthony spent his childhood in the 1950s. It was a life of spectacular beauty and privilege, but for a shy boy often lonely and fraught with the fear of breaking some unwritten rule of the Castle Way. As Anthony reveals in his extraordinarily vivid and frank memoir, such a childhood was perhaps not the best preparation for modern life beyond the castle's walls. By the end of the 1960s, the polite reserve of the Castle Way was starting to give way to unconventional music, manners, and social freedom-simultaneously alluring and alarming to a young man who had grown up in splendid isolation in a world that would soon be gone.

Author : John Pearson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1448207819
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book All the Money in the World written by John Pearson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the most infamous incident involving the Getty family - now a major film directed by Ridley Scott, starring Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Williams and Oscar® Nominee Christopher Plummer Oil tycoon J. Paul Getty created the greatest fortune in America - and came close to destroying his own family in the process. Of his four sons who reached manhood, only one survived relatively unscathed. One killed himself, one became a drug-addicted recluse and the third had to bear the stigma all his life of being disinherited in childhood. The unhappiness continued into the next generation, with the name Getty, as one journalist put it, 'becoming synonymous for family dysfunction'. Getty's once favourite grandson John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Italian mafia who cut off his ear to raise a ransom and, after a lifetime of drink and drugs, became a paraplegic. His granddaughter Aileen has AIDS. And the Getty family itself has been torn apart by litigation over their poisoned inheritance. But did the disaster have to happen? John Pearson, who has specialized in biographies of families as varied as the Churchills, the British Royal Family, the Devonshires and the Krays, sets out to find the answer. The result, first published in 1995, is a fascinating saga of an extraordinary dynasty. He traces much of the trouble to the bizarre character of the avaricious, sex-obsessed billionaire, J. Paul Getty himself - and demonstrates how much of his behaviour has been repeated in succeeding generations. He describes the famous kidnapping of his grandson in graphic detail, revealing how the old man's attitude added considerably to the boy's sufferings. And he shows how the family has coped with the latest modern scourges: drugs and AIDS. For All the Money in the World is not a hopeless story. While some of the family have been damaged by the Getty legacy, others have saved themselves from disaster, most notably the cricket-loving philanthropist, J. Paul Getty Jr. Pearson's moving story of his recovery from drugs and deep personal tragedy shows that there is hope for future generations of this stricken family - and demonstrates that money can be used to buy survival and even happiness.

Author : Tom Bower
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061146145
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Outrageous Fortune written by Tom Bower and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2006-11-07 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise and fall of media tycoon Conrad Black and his journalist wife, Barbara Amiel, is one of the great stories of the modern business world. In Outrageous Fortune, London-based journalist Tom Bower reveals how Conrad and Lady Black used other people's money to finance a billionaire's lifestyle, winning friends and influence in London and New York along the way. Their story of overweening ambition and greed is a modern-day classic of hubris. Born into considerable wealth in Canada, Conrad Black bought and sold (but never effectively managed) several businesses, from mining and tractors to broadcasting companies and newspapers. In 1985 Black's holding com-pany, Hollinger, bought the Telegraph Group, the British newspaper publishing conglomerate. In the years that followed, Black additionally became the proprietor of the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, and a host of other magazines and newspapers in the English-speaking world. In 1992 Conrad married Barbara Amiel, who later famously said, "I have an extravagance that knows no bounds." Besotted by his wife, he began living way beyond his means. Fabulous parties, jewelry, clothes, and multiple mansions followed, and by 2001 Black had renounced his Canadian citizenship—which he called "an impediment to my progress in another more amenable jurisdiction"—in order to become a life peer in the British House of Lords. But the scheming deceptive duo's lies came crashing down when, in November 2003, an American report accused Black of "outright fraud," "ethical corruption," and "corporate kleptocracy." Black was forced out as Hollinger's chief executive, and two years later he was charged with eight counts of fraud—allegations that he will vigorously deny at his trial in Chicago, beginning in March of 2007. Based on hundreds of interviews with bankers, politicians, journalists, mega-deal makers, and close friends of Conrad and Lady Black, Outrageous Fortune is packed with lively anecdotes and salacious gossip. It is a hugely enter-taining and engrossing account of gullibility in high places.

Author : Tim Scott
Publisher : Spectra
ISBN 13 : 0553589857
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Outrageous Fortune written by Tim Scott and published by Spectra. This book was released on 2008-06-24 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this outrageously funny, outrageously inventive debut, one of the most outrageously talented new writers to break onto the sci-fi scene in decades asks the most loaded question of all . . . “Don’t you hate it when this happens?” . . . that’s what the business card asks Jonny X67, dream architect to the rich and jaded. It’s all the thieves who stole his house left behind. And if that weren’t bad enough, a saleswoman named Caroline E61 drops from the sky to sell him a set of encyclopedias and won’t take no for an answer. Can his luck get any worse? In this rip-roaring roller-coaster ride through a brilliantly imagined future of paranoid absurdity, Jonny X will learn the answer soon enough when he falls afoul of a lunatic motorcycle gang nicknamed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a relentless Belgian assassin, and his own irate girlfriend. Traversing a cityscape whose neighborhoods are organized by musical genres, running into joke-telling elevators and holographic computer viruses, Jonny is about to learn what a nightmare it’s going to be to get his old life back in a reality warping faster than the speed of the imagination. Outrageous Fortune heralds a marvelous new talent sure to be delightfully altering the minds of readers for years to come.

Author : Lulu Taylor
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0099550466
Total Pages : 690 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Outrageous Fortune written by Lulu Taylor and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daisy Dangerfield has been brought up in the lap of luxury. Her father, Daddy Dangerfield, has given her the best of everything, she's not known a moment's doubt or worry. Until a shocking secret is revealed, and she is thrown out of the family with nothing but her dreams of revenge. Meanwhile on a rough council estate in East London, Chanelle has wanted to be a dancer her whole life. Dancing is the one thing that takes her out of the grim reality of her life with her alcoholic mother and she is determined to use any means possible to become successful, no matter how underhand her methods. Born on the same day Chanelle and Daisy's lives could not be more different. Until everything changes, and they discover they have more in common than they could ever have imagined.

Author : Michael Gross
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062803778
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Genuine Authentic written by Michael Gross and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating and comprehensive look into the life of American fashion designer Ralph Lauren, now with an afterword. “Deep-dish...sharp-clawed...honestly admiring.”—New York Times There are at least two Ralph Laurens. To the public he's a gentle, modest, yet secure and purposeful man. Inside the walls of Polo Ralph Lauren, though, he was long seen by some as a narcissist, an insecure ditherer, and, at times, a rampaging tyrant. Michael Gross, author of the bestsellers Model and 740 Park, lays bare the truths of this fashion emperor's rise, and reveals not only the secrets of his meteoric success in marketing our shared fantasies, but also a widely unknown side that's behind the designer’s chic façade.