| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age. By Eric Homberger. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xiv, 330 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-300-09501-5.)

It is somewhat surprising that one of the best observers of the New York scene is a professor at the University of East Anglia in England. In fact, Eric Homberger, author of Mrs. Astor's New York, has produced The Historical Atlas of New York City (1994), an illustrated history that considers Benevolent Culture, Fifth Avenue, Abstract Expressionists, skyscrapers, and mass transit all part of the kaleidoscope; New York City: A Cultural and Literary Companion (2003), a survey of places in the city—Parks, Harlem, Broadway, etc.—that includes the voices of Stephen Crane, Allen Ginsberg, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; and Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (1994), which focuses on the underside of the urban scene (the hardened underworld, the abortionist Madame Restell, "Slippery Dick" Connolly) and the triumph of Conscience in the building of Central Park. Such free-ranging and eclectic thinking is part of Homberger's charm. One can only marvel at Homberger's expertise: he also writes on the radical tradition (John Reed and the like), espionage (spy fiction and John le Carré), Jewish culture, and photography, not to mention dabbling in Ezra Pound, Anglo-American poetry, and biography. Thus we might assume that Mrs. Astor's New York is not the usual social dalliance one might have expected from the title.

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