Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America
*Starred Review* Miller dates the pivotal transformation of midtown Manhattan from the completion of Grand Central Terminal in 1913 and its direct impact on the area nearby, but he focuses on the next decade, during the colorful Prohibition Era mayoralty of Jimmy Walker. From 1921 to 1929, we learn, a building went up in New York, on average, every 51 minutes. Along with the construction came monumental cultural changes, described here in commensurate detail. In what amounts to a social history of an extraordinary place and time (though there is no attempt to explicitly demonstrate the premise of the subtitle), Miller offers portraits of outsized individuals who altered New York, most of them not native New Yorkers: architects, such as the Rumanian Jew, Emery Roth; media pioneers (David Sarnoff and William Paley); newspaper and book publishers (Horace Liveright, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, Bennett Cerf) , Broadway producers (Flo Ziegfeld), musicians (Duke Ellington); sports figures (Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth), and successful merchants (Bergdorf and Goodman, Gimbel, et al.). He includes exceptional immigrant women: rival cosmetics giants Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden and designer Hattie Carnegie. Miller’s prose is workmanlike but his scope prodigious, even if the book’s focus blurs amidst the deluge of minutiae. Predominantly relying on previous publications, Miller usefully attaches a 50-page bibliography that, perhaps as much as the text itself, will become an essential  resource for future historians. --Mark Levine