I had the good fortune and privilege of growing up in such colorful locales as Vienna, Libya, London, Paris, Turkey, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia, thanks to my father's work as an economist with the U.S. Agency for International Development. We were always traveling and as I got older school trips involved riding elephants up to a maharaja's palace or visiting Cambodian temples. By the time I entered Barnard College in New York in 1970, I had spent all but three years of my life overseas. And thus I was something of a stranger in my own land.

   After college I became a journalist. There was a brief internship in Washington, D.C., before heading north to bucolic upstate New York and the Troy Record. I was the beat reporter for the small working-class towns of Watervliet and Green Island. I loved getting to know all the local characters and figuring out what made these places tick. As it was the Bicentennial year, I resurrected in print the long-gone glory years of the region's Gilded Age, when water power, factories, the Erie Canal and the railroads generated real industrial wealth. It was my first taste of the pleasures of writing history.

   In 1977 I earned an MS from the Columbia Journalism School (it was as a student there that I first reported on the South Bronx), worked for a couple of years at The Bergen (N.J.) Record, and then became a free-lance magazine writer based in Manhattan. A story written for The New York Times about the efforts to revive the Grand Concourse, the magnificent Champs-Elysees of the stricken Bronx, grew into my first book. Having lived in many desperately poor countries, I wanted to understand how--in our rich nation--a once-thriving borough had come so close to annihilation from poverty, crime, abandonment, and arson.

   About the time I was finishing my Bronx book, I moved in 1983 with my husband to Baltimore, Maryland. Now I became absorbed in figuring out why the U.S. had such a powerful drug culture. It was a bleak fact that Baltimore right after World War II had fewer than one hundred heroin addicts. By the 1980s, there were tens of thousands. (Little did I dream that crack cocaine was poised to make the American drug scene far, far worse.) In 1992 I finished graduate school in American history at Johns Hopkins University, my thesis being on the history of illegal drugs. Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams was published in 1996. Susan Berresford and Bob Curvin at the Ford Foundation were important supporters of my work, providing money and encouragement for both books. The National Endowment for the Humanities also awarded a fellowship for Hep-cats. While helping create a new museum for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, I began thinking about my next project.

   With two long, complicated books about the failures of American life behind me, I now wanted to write about the nation's phenomenal successes, the United States that was an amazing engine of invention and prosperity. For me, that meant a story set in the Gilded Age, those tumultuous decades after the Civil War when America emerged as a wealthy and incomparable industrial power. I was reading an old biography of George Westinghouse when I came across several chapters on the War of the Electric Currents, Edison's DC system versus Westinghouse's AC. Despite being quite a famous episode in the history of science and business, this gothic corporate tale had never been told in all its bizarre and glorious detail. And so I began working on Empires of Light, thoroughly enjoying spending my days with these three visionary inventors and titans, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse, as they ruthlessly battled it out. The machinations, triumphs, and disappointments were so satisfyingly dramatic as each sought to dominate the neophyte technology of electricity. I hope my readers will find it all as enthralling as I did.

  Conquering Gotham, another Gilded Age epic, has its own dramatic back story. Despite pursuing this tale on and off for several years, I simply could not figure out where the Penn Station and tunnel documents might be in the vast and labyrinthine PRR archive in Harrisburg. Then on October 3, 2002, I found a  reference (written in tiny script) in a huge century-old leather-bound ledger index to The New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension and a file number. For a historian, this was an unforgettable Eureka!! moment. When those cartons came down from the archives I was thrilled to find in their dusty files what I had long been seeking: confidential letters and memos about politics, real estate, financing, construction, disasters, labor and engineering disputes, as well as meticulous everyday reports detailing the progress of this monumental project. What I would learn from the PRR’s own files over the next several years became the core of this amazing tale. 

  While no main character in Conquering Gotham is now as famous as those in Empires of Light, each was a giant of the Gilded Age, extraordinary men whom I came to find deeply compelling. Their political, financial, and engineering struggles changed forever the way I see New York City.