American Castle

"""Reading American Castle is like having a tabloid newspaper in front of you and a history book on the side. Or the other way around. Or both; straddling many important historical events, there's enough inside here to satisfy the two genres equally. If you love the history of privilege, politics, or current events, American Castle is a book you won't stop talking about."" —Terri Schlichenmeyer,  The Goshen News ""...a fast-paced narrative that takes a detailed look into the 118-room, 17-acre estate's history...What lies ahead for Mar-a-Lago isn't known.""  —Susan Salisbury, Palm Beach Daily News “An enthralling narrative of extreme American opulence and unforgettable characters set within Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Mar-a-Lago. American Castle is the brilliantly detailed, must-read prologue to the estate’s current chapter of excess and scandal.” —Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America “A history of a grand mansion and its numerous occupants . . . A well-told story that’s full of surprises, its storied subject generating headlines for a century."" —Kirkus Reviews “An entirely new perspective of the now world-famous Mar-a-Lago. The public tends to look at Mar-a-Lago as the residence of Donald Trump, without realizing that it once belonged to them as part of the National Park Service—and before that to one of the wealthiest and most compelling socialites in American history, Marjorie Merriweather Post. Bookended by the FBI search and Trump’s arrest, American Castle is an opulent, lively history of Post’s grand estate."" —Tim Franklin, Senior Associate Dean of Northwestern University Medill School, former President of the Poynter Institute ""Journalist Shanklin debuts with an immersive behind-the-scenes portrait of Mar-a-Lago, the former Palm Beach mansion turned private club. “An ode to Roaring Twenties excess,” the 17-acre “winter trophy estate” built by heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887–1973) cost $3 million and took three years, from 1924 to 1927, to complete. When Post took the reins of the General Foods empire in 1936, becoming one of the first women to “command a global corporation,” she shuttered the mansion. Five years later, she turned it into a tourist attraction to “raise much-needed war funds.” After the war, Post relocated to Hillwood, her Washington, D.C., mansion, and none of her children took an interest in Mar-a-Lago. The National Park Service acquired it in 1973, but, daunted by the costs of upkeep, returned it to the Post Foundation after only a year. Current owner Donald Trump acquired the estate in 1986 for $10 million, turned it into a private club in 1994, and used it as the winter White House during his presidency; Shanklin concludes with the 2022 FBI raid to retrieve classified documents from the club. Chronicling 100 years of contentious real estate schemes and failed plots to put “this massive souvenir of the 1920s” to good use, Shanklin demonstrates that Mar-a-Lago has had an unusually variegated history, even compared to similar Gilded Age castles. Readers will be entertained."" —Publishers Weekly"