Dreamland

Baker, Kevin

ISBN 10: 0060193093 ISBN 13: 9780060193096

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1999

Synopsis

Coney Island's Dreamland amusement park becomes the setting for a sweeping historical novel that follows a young Eastern European stowaway from his 1909 arrival in New York City through his rise to power in a Manhattan underworld organization to the birth of the labor union movement. 150,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

Kevin Baker's Dreamland is the kind of novel that begins with a two-page list of characters and ends with a nine-page glossary. In between, this vast, sprawling carnival of a book takes in Coney Island and the Lower East Side, midgets and gangsters, Bowery bars and opium dens, even Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It is, in short, a novel as big, lively, and ambitious as Gotham itself, and if you can stomach some of the more garish local color, it's every bit as much fun. Set at the turn of the century, in a New York as polyglot as any city on earth, Dreamland opens with an act of misplaced--and very stupid--compassion. Eastern European immigrant Kid Twist intervenes when villainous gangster Gyp the Blood is on the verge of murdering a young newsboy for sport. But surprise: that's no street urchin--that's Trick the Dwarf, self-proclaimed Mayor of Little City and a Coney Island tout, who dresses up as a boy, he says, as "a way I had of leaving myself behind." Trick hides Kid Twist in the hind parts of the Tin Elephant Hotel; Kid Twist meets Esther Abramowitz, impoverished seamstress and labor agitator, then falls in love; Trick woos Mad Carlotta, a three-foot beauty who thinks she's the Empress of Mexico; and Freud and Jung sail for America, where they squabble about psychoanalysis. There are also a few subplots involving police corruption, Tammany Hall, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire--but who's counting? Suffice to say that it all really does come together in the end, and you won't be bored for one step of the way. Baker served as chief historical researcher for Harold Evans's The American Century, and it's clear that he put his time there to good use; Dreamland is full of vivid historical detail, from Lower East Side slang to the lyrics of popular songs. If this is middlebrow entertainment, it's middlebrow in the same way as Dickens: extravagantly plotted, elegantly written, and compassionate to the core. --Mary Park

About the Author:

Kevin Baker is the author of the novel Sometimes You See It Coming (based loosely on the life of old-timer baseball great Ty Cobb) and served as chief historical researcher for the recently published The American Century by Harold Evans. He is married and lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0060193093
• ISBN 13: 9780060193096
• Binding: Library Binding
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 519