Stephen Birmingham has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 9 narrators. The most-rated is "Our Crowd".
Life at the Dakota
Summary
A history of the Manhattan building and its famous tenants, from Lauren Bacall to John Lennon, by the New York Times best-selling author of Our Crowd. When Singer sewing machine tycoon Edward Clark built a luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the late 1800s, it was derisively dubbed “the Dakota” for being as far from the center of the downtown action as its namesake territory on the nation’s western frontier. Despite its remote location, the quirky German Renaissance-style castle, with its intricate façade, peculiar interior design, and gargoyle guardians peering down on Central Park, was an immediate hit, particularly among the city’s well-heeled intellectuals and artists. Over the next century it would become home to an eclectic cast of celebrity residents - including Boris Karloff, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, singer Roberta Flack (the Dakota’s first African-American resident), and John Lennon and Yoko Ono - who were charmed by its labyrinthine interior and secret passageways, its mysterious past, and its ghosts. Stephen Birmingham, author of the New York society classic Our Crowd, has written an engrossing history of the first hundred years of one of the most storied residential addresses in Manhattan and the legendary lives lived within its walls.
©1979 Stephen Birmingham (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
The Grandees
Summary
The New World's earliest Jewish immigrants and their unique, little-known history: A New York Times bestseller from the author of Life at the Dakota. In 1654, twenty-three Jewish families arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) aboard a French privateer. They were the Sephardim, members of a proud orthodox sect that had served as royal advisors and honored professionals under Moorish rule in Spain and Portugal but were then exiled from their homeland by intolerant monarchs. A small, closed, and intensely private community, the Sephardim soon established themselves as businessmen and financiers, earning great wealth. They became powerful forces in society, with some, like banker Haym Salomon, even providing financial support to George Washington's army during the American Revolution. Yet despite its major role in the birth and growth of America, this extraordinary group has remained virtually impenetrable and unknowable to outsiders. From author of "Our Crowd", Stephen Birmingham, The Grandees delves into the lives of the Sephardim and their historic accomplishments, illuminating the insulated world of these early Americans. Birmingham reveals how these families, with descendants including poet Emma Lazarus, Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, influenced - and continue to influence - American society.
©1971 by Stephen Birmingham. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
"The Rest of Us"
Summary
The New York Times - bestselling history of the Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland who altered the American landscape from New York to Hollywood. The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and persecution were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the more refined and already well-established German-Jewish community. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined, and in no time they were moving up from the ghetto tenements of New York's Lower East Side to make their marks and their fortunes across the country in a variety of fields, from media and popular music to fashion, motion pictures, and even organized crime. Among the unforgettable personages author Stephen Birmingham profiles are radio pioneer David Sarnoff, makeup mogul Helena Rubinstein, Hollywood tycoons Samuel Goldwyn and Harry Cohn, Broadway composer Irving Berlin, and mobster Meyer Lansky. From the author of "Our Crowd", comes this treasure trove of fascinating tales and unforgettable "rags-to-riches" success stories that celebrates the indomitable spirit of a unique community.
©1984 Stephen Birmingham (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. From “The East European Immigrant Jew in America (1881–1981): Isaac Don Levine, Letters of an Immigrant,” American Jewish Archives, April 1981, Volume XXXIII, Number 1. By permission of American Jewish Archives. From The New York Times, September 1, 1967. © 1967 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. From BRONFMAN DYNASTY by Peter C. Newman. © 1978 by Peter C. Newman. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Canadian publishers, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto.
The Auerbach Will
Summary
In
The Auerbach Will, the novel by America's most renowned chronicler of the rich, ambitious young Essie Litsky defies a rigid upbringing by immigrant Russian Jewish parents to achieve wealth and success. But her children tear Essie and her husband Jack Auerbach's family apart in fights over their fortune, and Essie finds that money will not mend broken lives.
Stephen Birmingham concludes this complex family saga, set in the Park Avenue world he first portrayed in the best-selling Our Crowd, with a surprise revelation. The story of Essie Auerbach and the Auerbach Will is unforgettable.
©1983 Stephen Birmingham (P)2009 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
"Our Crowd"
Summary
The New York Times bestselling history of the rise of the most powerful and privileged Jewish families in America They immigrated to America from Germany in the nineteenth century with names like Loeb, Sachs, Seligman, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. From tenements on the Lower East Side to Park Avenue mansions, this handful of Jewish families turned small businesses into imposing enterprises and amassed spectacular fortunes. But despite possessing breathtaking wealth that rivaled the Astors and Rockefellers, they were barred by the gentile establishment from the lofty realm of "the 400," a register of New York's most elite, because of their religion and humble backgrounds. In response, they created their own elite "100," a privileged society as opulent and exclusive as the one that had refused them entry. "Our Crowd" is the fascinating story of this rarefied society. Based on letters, documents, diary entries, and intimate personal remembrances of family lore by members of these most illustrious clans, it is an engrossing portrait of upper-class Jewish life over two centuries; a riveting story of the bankers, brokers, financiers, philanthropists, and business tycoons who started with nothing and turned their family names into American institutions.
©1967 Stephen Birmingham (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. The Macmillan Company for the letters of Otto Kahn which appeared in "The Many Lives of Otto Kahn" by Mary Jane Mate, © 1963 by Margaret D. Ryan.