Book Reviews
Illuminative and utterly engaging.
Wall Street Journal
Bruce Knecht is my kind of reporter—a master storyteller with a great eye for the tales of our time. Grand Ambition is centered around the building of a huge yacht, but it is ultimately about our bipolar society—the rarefied lifestyles of the very, very rich and the day-to-day realities of blue-collar laborers who have never worked indoors or been paid more than $20 an hour.
Tom Brokaw
If this lively book doesn't "lift your boat," nothing will!
Steve Forbes
A meticulous account of the building of one of the largest American-made yachts since the Gilded Age. Royal families have long enjoyed large pleasure vessels.... In modern times, yachts have been the playthings of Russian oligarchs, Greek shipping magnates and Arabian sheiks. In the United States, the leisure vessels became a hallmark for a new kind of nobility, including J.P. Morgan, in the gilded 1890s and remain so for today's self-made entrepreneurs. This readable account tells the story of a former milkman's son, Doug Von Allmen, now a successful private equity investor in his late 60s, and his experience building a mammoth $40 million, 187-foot yacht.... Revealing and well-written.
Kirkus Reviews
Grand Ambition (Knecht) - Book Reviews
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