Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | FICTION BAK | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From a steamship, hundreds of immigrants strain for a glimpse of the promised land. As they approach, they see New York being consumed by flames. Their despair quickly turns to amazement as they realise that the searing flames are really the lights of Coney Islands' Dreamland Amusement Park.
Author Notes
Kevin Baker was born in August 1958, in Englewood, New Jersey and grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts. He graduated from Columbia University in New York City in 1980. He began his writing career directly after graduation.
His first novel, Sometimes You See It Coming, based loosely on the life of Ty Cobb, was published in hardcover in 1993 and in paperback by HarperPaperbacks in the spring of 2003. Dreamland, part of BakerÂs New York City of Fire trilogy, was published by HarperCollins in 1999, and in paperback the following year. Paradise Alley was published by HarperCollins in 2002.
Kevin was the chief historical researcher on Harold Evans' best-selling history, The American Century, published in 1999. He currently writes the monthly "In the News" column for American Heritage magazine, and has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Frankfurter Rundschau, HarperÂs magazine, Talk, and The Industry Standard.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Taking place in turn-of-the-century New York City, Baker's splashy novel features gangsters, midgets, feminist strikers, the Lower East Side, Coney Island, Freud's trip to America and the infamous Triangle Factory fire. It's a powerful, deeply moving epic, an earthier, rowdier, more inclusive Ragtime that rings beautiful changes on the familiar themes of the immigrant experience and the unfulfilled promise of the American Dream. Baker juggles subplots that reflect different ethnic and cultural realities: resilient, independent-minded sweatshop seamstress Esther Abramowitz rebels against her caustic Russian-Jewish ex-rabbi father to become a union organizer; Irish-American state senator Big Tim Sullivan, a corrupt Tammany Hall boss, rules the city through bribes, gangs and cops on the take; hoodlum Gyp the Blood (aka Lazar Abramowitz), who is Esther's estranged brother, puts out a hit on her boyfriend, Kid Twist (Josef Kolyika), an Eastern European refugee who arrived as a stowaway on the same ocean liner that, in this scenario, brings Freud and Jung to New York on a trip to promote psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, over in Dreamland, the vast Coney Island amusement park, the philosophically minded Trick the Dwarf courts another sideshow attraction, Mad Carlotta, a midget who thinks she's the Empress of Mexico. Baker, author of the baseball novel Sometimes You See It Coming and chief researcher on Harry Evans's The American Century, gives readers amazingly vivid renderings of the criminal underworld, prostitution, machine politics, Jewish immigrant life, the nascent women's rights and labor movements. Cultured Old World elitism comically collides with raucous democratic America as Freud gets lost in Harlem, has bizarre erotic dreams, falls out with Jung and has a nasty adventure in Dreamland. The churning subplots do get creaky (e.g., Esther's implausible love for a gangster), the colorful seediness often seems like gratuitous crowd-pleasing and the novel walks a tightrope between romantic sentimental fantasy and hard-boiled realism. Nevertheless, one is tempted to call this grandly entertaining saga some kind of populist masterpiece, as Baker gauges the myth of the egalitarian American melting-pot against the corruption, economic exploitation and racism of a cutthroat society. 100,000 first printing; $300,000 ad/promo; audio to HarperAudio; author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Before movies came along, New Yorkers flocked to Dreamland at Coney Island, where they could find every kind of marvel and amusement: freak shows, gondola rides, miniature replicas of famous disasters, even a hotel in the shape of a circus elephant. In this remarkable novel, Baker meticulously re-creates the splendor and seediness of turn-of-the-century New York--especially the street, where immigrants, politicians, grifters, and prostitutes all desperately mingled, playing their new roles. Like Doctorow's Ragtime, Baker's novel uses some historical figures as characters, such as Freud and Jung visiting on a lecture tour, but at its heart are Baker's fictional characters looking for love: Trick the Dwarf, who thinks he's found his queen; Esther, a sweatshop worker whose precious free hours are torn between the struggle for workers' rights and the thrill of her first lover; and Kid Twist, an expelled member of the Jewish Mob who literally risks his neck for romance. Baker clearly enjoys the tale-spinning, driving the story forward at just the right pace, yet confidently pausing at times to revisit key scenes from his characters' pasts; meanwhile, Freud and Jung debate passionately about influences on the psyche. Baker was the chief researcher of Harry Evans' The American Century [BKL Ag 98], and the number of fascinating facts contained in Dreamland is extraordinary. Baker-the-storyteller, however, never forgets that his facts are only the footlights and props for showcasing the emotions at center stage. Masterful and moving, this novel can transform a reader's relationship with our history. --James Klise
Kirkus Review
A sprawling doorstopper, set in turn-of-the-century New York. Baker's work as chief researcher for Harry Evans's recent The American Century is on generous display here. The various facets of New York and Coney Island, where the ornate park of the title is located, are scribed in intimate detail: the notorious jail The Tombs, City Hall, the Triangle garment factory, immigrant housing, whiskey bars, and strip joints, all are nicely animated. Meanwhile, dozens of characters stroll through these various locales: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung visit New York and observe the vulgarity of America; Trick the Dwarf tells of the bizarre and the humane at Dreamland'the dwarfs and the bearded ladies'which is the most familiar world he knows; and Esther, a garment worker alienated from her immigrant family, takes an active role in the labor movement. Also on hand are Gyp the Blood, a small-time criminal; Big Tim, the Tammany politico, plus Kid Twist and Sadie and Clara. Baker is trying to make larger points'for instance, seeing Dreamland as a grotesquely inspired reflection of New York City'but with so many people wandering across the pages of the novel like extras wearing different costumes, the larger ambitions are swallowed by boredom. We are left with authoritatively described, sometimes brutal scenes of corruption, abuse, depravity, manipulation, and coercion that make up a plot whose purpose is cloudy. Second-timer Baker (Sometimes You See it Coming, 1993) does an excellent job of evoking a time and a place, but the novel fails to transcend the genre of Costume Drama, busy as it is with surfaces and slangs, weather and buildings, workbenches and public speeches: the story projects no center, and it's too easy to forget why it matters at all. (First printing of 100,000; $300,000 ad/promo; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Library Journal Review
This intricate, retro nightmare vision of turn-of-the-century New York City is reminiscent of a Fellini film, full of picaresque, somewhat cardboardish gangsters and sideshow performers in place of clowns and grotesques. Narrator John Rubenstein successfully exudes all the excitement and unpredictability of the era that author Baker imaginatively conveys. The story is all the more interesting because good does not prevail and social progress is not assured. The effects of chaotic, unbridled change on a city and its people are the underlying theme. The abridgment works well in conveying the unstable, edgy quality of the novel; production values are high. Recommended.ÄMark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L.., Columbus, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Dreamland Chapter One I know a story. "I know a story," said Trick the Dwarf, and the rest of them leaned in close: Nanook the Esquimau, and Ota Benga the Pygmy, and Yolanda the Wild Queen of the Amazon. "What kind of story?" Yolanda's eyes bulged suspiciously, and it occurred to him again how she alone might actually be as advertised: tiny, leather-skinned woman with a mock feather headdress, betel nut juice dribbling out through the stumps of her teeth. A mulatto from Caracas, or a Negro Seminole woman from deep in the Okefenokee, at least. "What kind of a story?" He swiped at the last swathes of greasepaint around his neck and ears, and looked down the pier of the ruined park to the west before replying. All gone now, even the brilliant white tower festooned with eagles, its beacon reaching twenty miles out to sea. Gone, gone. It was evening, and the lights were just going up along Surf Avenue: a million electric bulbs spinning a soft, yellow gauze over the beach and parks. The night crowd was already arriving, pouring off the New York & Sea Beach line in white trousers and dresses, white jackets and skirts and straw hats--all quickly absorbed by the glowing lights. The City of Fire was coming to life. He could hear the muffled fart of a tuba from the German oompah band warming up in Feltman's beer garden. Beyond the garden was the Ziz coaster, hissing and undulating through the trees with the peculiar sound that gave it its name. Beyond that was the high glass trellises of Steeplechase Park, with its ubiquitous idiot's face and slogan, repeated over and over--steeplechase--funny place--steeplechase--funny place--. Beyond that the ocean, where a single, low-slung freighter was making for Seagate ahead of the night. He could see even further. He could see into the past where Piet Cronje's little Boer cottage bad stood, or the Rough Riders coaster, before some fool sailed it right off the rails, sixty feet into the air over Surf Avenue. Where a whole city had stood, back beyond the ruined pier-- Meet me tonight in Dreamland Under the silvery moon Soon? he knew, the soft yellow lights would be honed by the darkness into something sharper. They would become hard, and clear: fierce little pearls of fire, obliterating every thing else with their brightness. None of them now on the pier would see it, not Yoland or Ota Benga or Nanook the Esquimau. They would be working by then, in their booths and sideshows. They would not see the lights again until they were on their way home, in the early morning; would see them only as they shut down, already faded to a fraudulent, rosy hue by the sun rising over the ocean. Meet me tonight in Dreamland where love's sweet roses bloom Come with the lovelight gleaming In your dear eyes of blue Meet me in Dreamland Sweet dreamy Dreamland There let my dreams come true They liked to sit out on the ruined pier during the dinner hour, between the heavy action of the day and the night shows. They slumped on the rotted pilings, where once a hundred excursion boats a day had tied up, to smoke and eat, and spit and smoke and tell their stories: Ota Benga, spindly and humpbacked, no real pygmy but a tubercular piano player from Kansas City, exotic moniker lifted from an old carny sensation of the past-- In the City everything was passed down, even the names of the freaks and the gangsters-- --Nanook the Massive, Nanook the Implacable, slit-eyed hero of the north--who was in fact a woman from some extinguished Plains tribe, signed on after her old man had tried to force her into whoring at the Tin Elephant hotel along Brighton Beach. And then there was Yolanda. Immense frog eyes still staring up at him, curved beak of a nose, skin the color and texture of a well-used saddle-- "It's a love story," Trick told her. "It's a story about love, and jealousy, and betrayal. A story about a young man, the young woman who loved him, and a terrible villain--a story about death, and destruction, and fire. it is a story about thieves and cutthroats, and one man's vision, and the poor man's burden, and the rich man's condescension. "It is a story about Kid Twist, the gangster, and Gyp the Blood, who was a killer, and Big Tim the politician, and poor Beansy Rosenthal, who couldn't keep his mouth shut. It is a story about Sadie the whore, and the brave Esther, and the mad Carlotta, and the last summer they all came together in the great park. "It is a story about the Great Head Doctors from Vienna, and the rampages of beasts, and the wonders of the Modern Age. It is a story about the great city, and a little city, and a land of dreams. And always, above all, it is a story about fire." "Ah," said Yolanda, satisfied now, leaning back and lighting her pipe. "Ah. The usual." Dreamland . Copyright © by Kevin Baker. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Dreamland by Kevin Baker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
