narrative features have appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, Discover Magazine, Mother Jones, Playboy, Scientific American, the Atavist, BusinessWeek and many others.
Piore's new book is The New Kings of New York.
At Lit Hub he tagged five of his favorite books about New York City's "most iconic properties, and the big personalities behind them." One title on the list:
Julie Satow, The Plaza: The Secret Life of America’s Most Famous Hotel (Twelve)Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.
Satow’s book is epic in scope, tracing the illustrious history of a hotel that was synonymous with luxury and glamour through many generations. This book has it all—The Plaza’s Gilded Age birth in 1907, when its hallowed halls were inhabited by the likes of the Vanderbilts, Astors. and Morgans. The roaring 20s and the Jazz Age—those giddy good times before the fall when a young F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgeraldtook a drunken dip in the fountain outside. (Ernest Hemingway once joked that when Scott died his liver should go to Princeton and his heart to the Plaza.)
And the famous institution’s role during the dawning of the second Gilded Age: you can read about the condo conversation plan in the early aughts, when a mysterious Russian oligarch, famous for surviving a car bombing in a Kremlin parking lot, paid a record price for the hotel’s largest penthouse. And, once again, the ubiquitous Harry Macklowe and his soon-to-be-divorced wife of 57 years, who also purchased a pair of units, moved in, and muscled onto the condo board. Along the way, you’ll read about a cold-blooded murder, a disgraced Indian tycoon who ran the hotel from a maximum-security prison cell 7,000 miles away in Delhi, and the real story behind Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.
--Marshal Zeringue
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