“The brief and gorgeous long decade Miller bring so vividly to life glitters before us like setting sunlight on high Manhattan glass. He catches the dirt and the laughter, the daring, the insane chances, the new technological marvels and even the beauty, and for 700 pages that read as fast as 50, he makes us want to live there. The result is certainly one of the best histories ever written of the second greatest city in the United States.”
-Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly Review & Steve Reads #3 Best Book of 2014
“An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment.”
–Kirkus Review, Ranked a Best Non-Fiction Book of 2014
“Supreme City is an important book by a renowned historian about a remarkable decade that saw the spectacular rise of Manhattan. It’s written with such engaging prose that most readers will agree with my assessment that I didn’t want it to end!”
-David M. Kinchen, Huntington News
“Donald Miller’s latest triumph… elegantly introduces one vivid character after another to recreate a vital and archetypical era when, as Duke Ellington declared, the whole world revolved around New York.”
-Sam Roberts, The New York Times
“Entertaining…accessible, romantic, sweeping and celebratory.”
-Beverly Gage, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“Supreme City captures a vanished Gotham in all its bustle, gristle, and glory.”
-David Friend, Vanity Fair
“Miller skillfully weaves these different and colorful strands into a narrative both coherent and vivacious. It is a story that many New Yorkers probably know only in narrow patches defined by their own professional or social perspectives. The full story richly deserves his original synthesis and, for me, makes New York even more fascinating.”
–Robert MacNeil, The Washington Post
Jazz Age Manhattan was an electric vessel into which the hopes and desires of a nation were distilled.
“Miller’s sweeping “Supreme City” is filled with an epic’s worth of such figures: people born elsewhere who transformed the city that had first transformed them. Mr. Miller’s arena is the Midtown Manhattan of the 1920s, which was being torn down and redeveloped at an unprecedented pace.”
-David Freeland, The Wall Street Journal
“A splendid account of the construction boom in Midtown Manhattan between World War I and the Great Depression, and the transformation of transportation, communications, publishing, sports, and fashion that accompanied it.”
“[Miller is] a virtuosic storyteller… [He brings] to life the outsized ambition, creativity, idiosyncrasies, and achievements of his extraordinary cast of characters.”
-Glenn C. Altschuler, Philadelphia Inquirer
“This is a beautiful book, an incredible book. If you really want to understand how Manhattan gave birth to modern America, and what Manhattan was, and in many ways may still be, this really is the book for you to read this summer.”
“The great lesson of the book, the great takeaway, is that these were people who really tested the limits of the possible. It’s so inspiring to read their stories. It makes you want to be bolder than you are, more creative.”
-Judith Regan, host of “The Judith Regan Show,” Sirius Radio
Supreme City sketches the origins of mass culture, from cosmetics to boxers and department stores, and shows how New York became the quintessential 20th century city.
“The sure hand of a seasoned professional is evident in Miller’s… lengthy but lively new book, which synthesizes a vast amount of material on everything from skyscrapers to showgirls to create a scintillating portrait of Manhattan in the ’20s. Miller… knows how to bring scholarship to life for a general audience without dumbing it down. He expertly weaves multiple strands of information into a smooth narrative studded with mini-biographies…”
-Wendy Smith, The Daily Beast
“The brief and gorgeous long decade Miller brings so vividly to life glitters before us like setting sunlight on high Manhattan glass. He catches the dirt and the laughter, the daring, the insane chances, the new technological marvels and even the beauty, and for 700 pages that read as fast as 50, he makes us want to live there. The result is certainly one of the best histories ever written of the second greatest city in the United States.” [Mr. Donoghue is from Boston]
-Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly: An Arts and Literature Review
Miller’s saga…reads like an F, Scott Fitzgerald novel…[but] Miller’s characters, unlike Fitzgerald’s, are the real deal…With a novelist’s skill, he brings history alive through vignettes on the lives of gangsters, corporate barons, corrupt politicians, impresarios and sports legends who left their indelible imprint on the city, the nation and history.”
-Ron Devlin, Reading Eagle
“Donald L. Miller’s Supreme City is an awesome book on an awesome subject, a time in the history of New York City when commerce and culture engaged in a symbiotic relationship, spurring an unprecedented boom in architecture, art, music, theater, popular culture and communications that lit up the city, then American, and then the world.”
–Allen Barra,“When New York Hit Its Stride,” The Daily Beast
“A great skyscraper of a book. Supreme City is the improbable story not just of America’s greatest metropolis during the Jazz Age, but the biography of an epoch.”
Rick Atkinson, author of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Europe, 1944-1945
“Lower Manhattan dominated New York for three hundred years. In the 1920’s, however, as Donald L. Miller makes clear in a page-turning book with an astonishing cast of characters, Midtown became the beating heart of the metropolis. Supreme City is about how these few square miles at the center of a small island gave birth to modern America. If you love Gotham, you will love this book.”
-Kenneth Jackson, Barzun Professor of History, Columbia University; Editor-in-Chief, The Encyclopedia of New York City
“Miller captures the heady excitement and enduring creativity of 1920s Manhattan. . . . Conveying the panoramic sweep of the era with wit, illuminating details, humor, and style, Miller illustrates how Midtown Manhattan became the nation’s communications, entertainment, and commercial epicenter.”
Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review
“Supreme City sings with all the excitement and the brilliance of the Jazz Age it recounts. Donald Miller is one of America’s most fervent and insightful writers about the urban experience; here he gives us New York City at its grandest and most optimistic.”
-Kevin Baker, author of The Big Crowd
“Donald L. Miller has long been one of my favorite historians. Anyone who reads Supreme City will understand why. Miller brilliantly examines the birth of Midtown Manhattan during the glorious Jazz Age. It’s the story of how a gaggle of success-hungry out-of-towners—including Duke Ellington, Walter Chrysler, E. B. White, and William Paley—turned the Valley of Giant Skyscrapers near Grand Central Terminal into the symbolic epicenter of wealth, power, and American can-doism. Highly recommended!”
–Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History, Rice University and author of Cronkite
An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment.
“…the narrative bursts with a dizzying succession of tales about the politicos, impresarios, merchants, sportsmen, performers, gangsters and hustlers who accounted for an unprecedented burst of creativity and achievement.”
“A scholarly enough social history but one with plenty of sex appeal.”
-Kirkus Reviews; Starred Review
“Original in concept, deeply researched, and utterly fascinating, “Supreme City” transports readers to that time and to the city which outsiders embraced, in E.B. White’s words, ‘with the intense excitement of first love.’”
-Neil Rajala, Notes from Neil
“…one of the most entertaining books on New York City history I’ve read in the past couple years.”
-Greg Young, Bowery Boys
“Manhattan in the 1920s is brought to vivid life in a sweeping account of Midtown—that small space replete with clubs, skyscrapers, theaters, and department stores. Chock-full of the characters that made the city, from the famous to the infamous to the everyday, Miller’s social history is deeply engrossing and well captures the vibrant feel of the era.”
-Neal Wyatt, “Five Titles Not to Miss this Month,” Wyatt’s World
New York Times Book Review Podcast with Pamela Paul Listen now
“Miller popped into buildings surrounding Grand Central Station and admired the Art Deco designs popular in the 1920s. He feels the buildings have as much personality as the people in them.”
-John Best, Lehigh Valley Live
“[Miller’s] book contains the evidence of mountains of research in hundreds of pages of footnotes, but Miller also cares about plot, characters and narrative.”
-Bill Landauer, The Morning Call & the Sun Sentinel
“The Crash of 1929 brought an end to the era captured lovingly in Miller’s book, one well worth reading.”
-Alan Caruba, National Book Critics Circle
“Supreme City is a fascinating read as Donald Miller has infused each segment with personal interest and factually accurate facts that makes this a highly readable and intriguing study. He has obviously intensely researched his subject and yet never allows it to become dry or boring. This is a text to not only slowly relish but to keep on one’s coffee table, not as a dust-gathering knickknack but as a book that will draw further interest and reading from all who stop to momentarily and briefly pursue any one of its page – it’s that great and wonderful a book and definitely a classic study of New York City!”
Viviane Crystal, Crystals Book Reviews
“Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth To Modern America tells the story of New York in the 1920’s, essentially through a series of mini-biographies of the men and women who revolutionized the city and had major impacts on the entire nation.”
-“The Greatest Yankee of All Time?”, Yesterday & Today Blog