Word: dressler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other literary extreme, Horatio Alger's heroes triumphed through trustworthiness, diligence and stupefying practicality. As usual, the truth about the business world lies somewhere between comic cynicism and Rotarian sentimentality, in a psychological wilderness area now artfully surveyed by Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (Crown; 294 pages...
...York City at the turn of the century, this tale of a young man, a real-estate dreamer, embodies both the realities and the fantasies of a growing nation infatuated with its own possibilities. Dressler is only nine years old when he builds a display that makes the 5' cigars in his father's tobacco shop look more expensive. As a teenage bellhop, he boosts sales at a hotel concession. In 1894 at the age of 22, he opens the Metropolitan Lunchroom and Billiard Parlor, a winning concept that is expanded northward into the newly developing acreage bordering Central Park...
...Manhattan as it began to transform its landscape into a 20th century skyline: an eruption of "modern flowers with veins of steel, bursting out of bedrock." It does not take a Viennese mind doctor to find eroticism in such charged imagery. Building cities is a procreative business, and Dressler is an evocative example of a breed driven to reproduce itself in concrete. A decision to marry a withdrawn woman of no discernible personality is a strong indication of his diverted passions...
...such respects Martin Dressler is an urban fable about civilization and its discontents, the repression of instincts in the service of progress. Yet this commercial hero also represents a period of social history when ambition and new wealth outstripped utility and taste. Dressler's Grand Cosmo, an architectural and cultural Tower of Babel, is part residence and part theme park. Within its 30 stories and two subterranean levels are a beach, a lake, a model New England village, a Moorish bazaar and a simulated asylum for the insane. Criticized as an example of "the worst excesses of late Victorian eclecticism...
...Dressler is the owner of a .656 save percentage and a 7.70 GAA, second in overall goalkeeping among Ivy goalkeepers to Princeton's Scott Bacigalupo...