The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America [SIGNED BY BOTH AUTHORS] [VINTAGE 2007] [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Fine condition blue gray boards with silver spine lettering contained in a near fine condition non price-clipped color photographic dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by Robert F. Dalzell and Lee Baldwin Dalzell; Authors Dedication; Preliminary Page Quotes; Preface; Acknowledgments; Notes; Index and About the Authors. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates, some additional black-and-white photographs, and a black-and-white photographic frontispiece. A crease along the jacket spine (see photographs). All pages are in fine unmarked condition. Signed by both authors with black ink at the lower right section of the full title page. "This is a book about a house, to be sure, but more about the conversations taking place inside it, which the Dalzells have recovered with perfect pitch - coversations about what to do with the greatest forturne in American history." - Joseph J. Ellis, author. "The creation of a great house is not unlike the raising of a child. Lee and Robert Dalzell have brilliantly brought to life the complexities, constraints, and compromises that underlie the drama surrounding the building of Kykuit and have continued the story through the years that followed with equal finesse." - Pauline C. Metcalf, author. "What it was like to be as rich as Rockefeller - how a house gave shape and meaning to three generations of an iconic American family. One hundred years ago America's riches man established a dynastic seat, the granite-clad Kykuit, high above the Hudson River. Though George Vanderbilit's 255-room Biltmore had recently put the American country house on the money map, John D. Rockefeller, who detested ostentation, had something simple in mind - at least until his son, John Jr., and Junior's charming wife, Abby, injected classical taste and a spirit of noblesse oblige into the equation. Built to honor the senior Rockefeller, the house would also become the place above all others that anchored the family's memories and sense of itself. Simultaneously grand and restrained, Kykuit was to stand as the ideal blending of great wealth and democracy - or so the Rockefellers hoped. With memorable skill and insight, the authors take us inside the house and the family to observe how that vision played itself out through a century of building and rebuilding as each new generation left its distinctive mark on the place. At Kykuit, John Sr. could be with his children adn grandchildren and indulge his passion for golf, though in later years he seemed to find life there excessively formal and spent more and more time elsewhere. After his father's death, Junior made it his goal to keep the place unchanged, while Abby, with her love of family and openness to new ideas, devoted herself to giving it life and warmth. Their son Nelson used it for political entertaining on a grand scale and brought to it his extraordinary collection of the modern art his mother had taught him to love, but which hs father had always abhorred. Nelson also - much against the wishes of the rest of the family - initiated in his will the process of opening the house to the public, which finally came to pass in 1994. A complex saga, The House the Rockefellers Built is alive with surprising twists and turns that reveal the Rockefellers often sharply at odds with one another about the family fortune and the house that symbolized it. It is hard to imagine a more revealing portraint of the family and its protean ambitions for the vast wealth that John Sr. had settled upon it." - from the inner front jacket flap. …