Business bookshelf: The Liar's Ball

The real estate business, goes an industry proverb, is "a circle of men holding a revolver to each other's heads." And, all too often, to their own, as Vicky Ward illustrates in her colorful history of America's most fought-over office block: the 50-floor General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Built for the carmaker's bosses in the mid-1960s — when what was good for the company was said to be good for America — the white-marble tower was never New York's tallest or most beautiful skyscraper. But something about it drove the property tycoons nuts. Their pursuit of it was often sordid, and the sums they were willing to risk irrational. One mogul compares the building to "the girl you keep asking to the prom but says no. And each time you ask she gets more expensive."

Ward, whose breakthrough book was "The Devil's Casino," about the fall of Lehman Brothers, has fun with the obsessive, hubristic cast of characters who have scrapped over the building. As they hustle, in some cases taking on vast debts to secure the prize, these bigwigs do plenty of dangerous gambling, double-crossing and, of course, suing. The most financially reckless of all was Harry Macklowe, who got his hands on the block in 2003 for $1.4 billion, only to lose it five years later because he had posted it as collateral for loans for the spectacularly ill-advised purchase of seven other buildings.

One of Macklowe's better decisions was to sign a deal with Apple. Its flagship store, located under a giant glass cube in the plaza, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Today the skyscraper is associated more with mobile devices than with motor vehicles.