Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

xiv, 512 pages. Frontis illustrations. Occasional footnotes. Illustrations. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Black mark on bottom edge. He is best known for having served as the first public editor of The New York Times newspaper, for inventing Rotisserie League Baseball, and for writing several books, such as Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, which served as a major source for the 2011 Ken Burns/Lynn Novick miniseries Prohibition. In November 2011, Last Call won the Albert J. Beveridge prize, awarded by the American Historical Association to the year's best book of American history. His book Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (Viking, 2003) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. A suitably grand, and suitably complex, history of the skyscraper that remains a symbol of all that is wondrous about New York City. The project began as an opera house, shifted locations and key backers and eventually purposes, and fell into the hands of the illustrious and magnificently moneyed Rockefeller family. After tough negotiations with the president and trustees of Columbia University, the Rockefellers and their architects broadened their notion of the project to make it even grander. Peopling his narrative with a vast array of characters-among them, sometimes in cameo, Benito Mussolini, Diego Rivera, V.I. Lenin, Henry Luce, and, of course, John D. Rockefeller, then the wealthiest man in the world, and his son Nelson, whose oversight turned out to be of critical importance. Okrent takes readers on an improbably wild ride that will leave them wondering how the skyscraper ever got built, but glad that it did. A passionate tribute to urban architecture and the grand buildings of old New York.…