740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building
ISBN:9780767917445 read summary

This is one of the most boring and annoying books to have ever come off of a printing press, going all the way back to the time Guttenburg printed his first Bible. It wanders from here to there, completely off topic, then seemingly forgets where it should even go back to. I couldn't make it to even page 100, and I was angry that I had wasted so much money. I threw it away.

This book presents itself as being about a building and its inhabitants, but cannot manage to stay on topic for more than a few paragraphs. A typical sentence from this book might read, "Sir Northropshire purchased a unit with the money he'd made in railroad ties, but rumors held that his success was strictly a function of his second marriage to Lady Whippledorf, whose family had connections in Railroad-Tying. Lady Whippledorf was known to dally in the forests outside of Montauk, where she summered with her second and third cousins, but not her first cousins, due to their allergies. Allergies were a common problem in pre-war Long Island, having claimed the lives of all but two of the seven famed "Knights of the Gilded Stevedore" a group which boasted Nelson Rockefeller as a one-time member owing to a clerical error. Although the Rockefellers -did- in fact...."

And on and on and on. Each sentence in this book can be read as a totally separate tract, and the book will impart the same level of knowledge. A terrible waste of time.

The most fascinsting review on the most fascinating building on Park Avenue and it's fascinating inhabitants by the fascinating New York City (Vassar) author Michael Gross.
A MUST ! I give it 5 stars + !!

I hardly ever fault a book for being too detailed, as I usually love a lot of description and tidbits, but this was just way.too.much. I don't think we needed a meticulous, pedantic recounting of the family tree of every single person who ever set foot in 740 Park in its entire history. An entry about a person will go on for pages before you figure out that the person never actually lived in the building, just wanted to, or maybe attended a party there. Minor anecdotes about the residents are confirmed, and reconfirmed, and reconfirmed again by seven different sources saying the exact same thing. The same subject matter - economics, social mores of a particular time, anti-Semitism - is covered multiple times in multiple places in each chapter. There's plenty of juicy info in here, but it's surrounded by page after page of sawdust-dry minutiae about the elaborate family history of one of the residents. I think the book would have been far more effective had the author chosen to organize the chapters by apartment - reviewing the history of each unit from the building's inception to the present, so you could track the procession of residents through a unit as time progressed - rather than how it was subdivided, by era, but jumping back and forth from one year to the next. I could never get a good sense of who had lived in which apartment at what time, or how apartments got transferred and to whom. And this book desperately, desperately needed a strong-willed editor who could have put his/her foot down and made the author cut about 300 pages from the book. I also agree with the other reviewer comments about the lack of pictures - this subject was crying out for them, and more pictures would definitely have helped break up the monolithic text. There are great stories to tell in here, but you have to dig through so much irrelevant data that in the end, the read just isn't worth it. This is a clear case where an author fell in love with his subject, immersed himself in it, and in the end, got so attached to his research he couldn't see what to put in and what to leave out. The book would have been ten times better with half the content.

I purchased this book as a gift for a friend, having read it a couple of years ago. It's one of the most compelling books I've come across in a long time. Who would have thought the focus on one particular building could be so intriguing.