A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs. Astor in Gilded Age New York
by: King, Greg

Hardcover. Hoboken NJ, Wiley, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 508 pages.Take a dazzling journey through the Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when bluebloods from older, established families met the nouveau riche headlong-railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street speculators-and forged an uneasy and glittering new society in New York City. The best of the best were Caroline Astor's 400 families, and she shaped and ruled this high society with steel. A Season of Splendor is a panoramic sweep across this sumptuous landscape, presenting the families, the wealth, the balls, the clothing, and the mansions in vivid detail-as well as the shocking end of the era with the sinking of the Titanic. Clean copy.