Supreme City

Starred review from February 10, 2014
Lafayette College history professor Miller (Masters of the Air) captures the heady excitement and enduring creativity of 1920s Manhattan. Focusing on development of Midtown Manhattan, Miller vividly reimagines the city to describe the lives of his characters—those responsible for the skyscrapers, hotels, department stores, co-ops, night clubs, theaters, and businesses that flocked to Midtown after the completion of Grand Central Station in 1913. His cast includes the famous (Charles Lindbergh, Duke Ellington); the infamous (mobster Owney Madden); the ingenious (George Washington bridge engineer Othmar Ammann); and the entrepreneurial (cosmetics empress Helen Rubenstein, NBC founder David Sarnoff). Others—longshoremen, garment workers, ironworkers—labored behind the scenes. Miller covers topics as diverse as the crime syndicates and bootleggers of the Prohibition era; changes in the housing market; the evolution of the publishing industry; the construction of chic, art deco office buildings, such as the Chrysler, that transformed Midtown into a mercantile center with distinctive boundaries; and far more. Conveying the panoramic sweep of the era with wit, illuminating details, humor, and style, Miller illustrates how Midtown Manhattan became the nation’s communications, entertainment, and commercial epicenter. 50 b&w images in a 24-page insert. Agent: Gina Maccoby, Gina Maccoby Literary Agency.

Starred review from November 15, 2014
From the end of the World War I until the Great Depression, America saw an extraordinary flowering of culture, commerce, and invention focused particularly in Manhattan. Here, under the corrupt but vigorous rule of Mayor Jimmy Walker, New York hosted entertainment magnates such as Florenz Ziegfeld and Texas Guinan, media pioneers David Sarnoff and William Paley, sports heroes Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, Prohibition-era gangsters Arnold Rothstein and Frank Costello, and a boom in rail transportation and skyscraper construction. In a captivating series of biographical sketches, Miller documents the way in which Jazz Age Manhattan attracted a unique group of talented and ambitious individuals and became the social and economic epicenter of America in the space of about ten years. Despite the daunting length of the audiobook, narrator Jim Frangione does a fine job of maintaining its energetic pace. VERDICT Endlessly fascinating, this work will appeal especially to fans of 20th-century American history.--Forrest Link, Coll. of New Jersey Lib., Ewing

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2014
Miller dates the pivotal transformation of midtown Manhattan from the completion of Grand Central Terminal in 1913 and its direct impact on the area nearby, but he focuses on the next decade, during the colorful Prohibition Era mayoralty of Jimmy Walker. From 1921 to 1929, we learn, a building went up in New York, on average, every 51 minutes. Along with the construction came monumental cultural changes, described here in commensurate detail. In what amounts to a social history of an extraordinary place and time (though there is no attempt to explicitly demonstrate the premise of the subtitle), Miller offers portraits of outsized individuals who altered New York, most of them not native New Yorkers: architects, such as the Rumanian Jew, Emery Roth; media pioneers (David Sarnoff and William Paley); newspaper and book publishers (Horace Liveright, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, Bennett Cerf), Broadway producers (Flo Ziegfeld), musicians (Duke Ellington); sports figures (Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth), and successful merchants (Bergdorf and Goodman, Gimbel, et al.). He includes exceptional immigrant women: rival cosmetics giants Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden and designer Hattie Carnegie. Miller's prose is workmanlike but his scope prodigious, even if the book's focus blurs amidst the deluge of minutiae. Predominantly relying on previous publications, Miller usefully attaches a 50-page bibliography that, perhaps as much as the text itself, will become an essential resource for future historians.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)