The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots

For the last two decades, The New York Observer has documented the Platinum Age of New York, when the city's new elite rose and dominated society, media, business, and culture with an amusing arrogance that redefined the power capital of the world. The Kingdom of New York jauntily chronicles the Rise and Fall and Rise of New York City, as personified by the protagonists and antagonists of the past twenty years, told in archival pastiche—a breathtaking sprint of headlines, great reporting, witty writing, and stories in fashion, ideas, real estate, style, media, movies, politics, sex, and finance.

All of New York's major players are here—including Bill and Hillary, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Graydon Carter, Katie Couric, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Tina Fey, J. Lo, Seinfeld, Tina Brown, Anderson Cooper—as well as essays by Cynthia Ozick, Gay Talese, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese. Here, too, are many of the country's finest journalists reporting on the high opulence of the 1990s; the wry irony of the Seinfeld years; the poignant loss of John Kennedy Jr.; and the inconceivable assault of September 11, 2001, and New York's rallying return. Among it all are signature features—from Candace Bushnell's "Sex and the City" columns as they initially appeared to the couples counseling of "George and Hilly"—as the Observer grew into one of the city's most influential papers.

Handsomely designed and filled with the paper's trademark attention to politics, status, and wealth, this is a rollicking insider's account of contemporary New York. At once wickedly funny and astute, The Kingdom of New York is a striking tribute to an unforgettable era in the city's history.