The New York Times reviews “Flight of the WASP”
Alexandra Jacobs writes in the Times, “In Flight of the WASP, the inveterate dirt-digger Michael Gross gives America’s elite families the white-glove treatment…Formal, sincere…[it] sternly accounts for their evil deeds while also tabulating their noble ones.” Jacobs highlights several notable characters in the book–Gouverneur Morris, Lewis Cass, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Michael Butler–and notes approvingly […]
“The characters exude real life like it was yesterday,” says New York Social Diary
David Patrick Columbia covers the launch party for Flight of the WASP in his New York Social Diary column today, saying that the gathering at the home of my friends Asher and Michelle Edelman (“among the guests,” he writes, were “members of Society as developed and practiced by Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, The Mrs. Astor”) made him […]
WASP kicks on Page Six
Today’s New York Post features my story (posted yesterday) on fact-checking WASP family trees while writing Flight of the WASP, and a lead item on Page Six about Whitney Tower, Jr., a living scion of one of the featured families. The Post’s irrepressible headline writers had fun with both, titling the first “Mayflower madness: America’s […]
“Mayflower Madness.” Flight of the WASP lands in the New York Post
Were your ancestors American aristocrats? Do you share a name with a signer of the Declaration of Independence ? In “Mayflower Madness,” a story for tomorrow’s New York Post just posted online, I recount my research for Flight of the WASP, and how one wealthy family, the Butlers of Illinois, boasted of an apocryphal link […]
Time for WASPs
Time Magazine’s Ideas section just posted my essay, What We Lost with the End of the WASPocracy. It asks if defeating Donald Trump, “the hero of the heirs of frontier America, the living embodiment of the myriad flaws of WASPs,” might remind us of what White Anglo Saxon Protestants got right, and help restore America’s […]
Sneak Peak: The Father of American Philanthropy
Town & Country magazine has the exclusive first excerpt from Flight of the WASP and it’s online now. It’s the story of how George Peabody, member of a renowned Colonial clan, remade his image from miser to the man of the people.
When Gossip Met History
Gore Vidal once said, “Everybody likes a bit of gossip … as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.” Today’s Richard Johnson column in the New York Daily News (unfortunately, locked online) […]
Flight is a “masterpiece…endlessly entertaining,” says Whom You Know
Peachy Deegan‘s Whom You Know reviews Flight of the WASP today and gives it a diamond-clad peach check of approval. “Obviously, we are not talking insects here. White Anglo Saxon Protestants have unequivocally been the ruling class of American society at its origin. If you think you know everything about them, all we have to […]
How I Spent My September Vacation
And now, for someplace completely different. Today’s edition of AirMail features “Ace of Basins,” my postcard from the Arcachon Basin on the east coast of France, just west of Bordeaux. After a disappointing sojourn to the South of France in June (too much: crowds, bling, fusion restaurants), a week in Le Moulleau was as delightful […]
A Sneak Peek at Flight of the WASP
The first excerpt of Flight of the WASP is out today in Town & Country magazine’s Philanthropy issue. It’s the story of George Peabody, the sixth-generation American who founded the investment bank predecessor of today’s JPMorganChase, gave J. Pierpoint Morgan his start in business, and then transformed his acquisitive image to become the father of […]