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    Dreamland
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    Dreamland
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    Dreamland
    Ebook802 pages11 hours

    Dreamland

    By Kevin Baker

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A literary tour de force, a magnificent chronicle of a remarkable era and a place of dreams

    In a stunning work of imagination and memory, author Kevin Baker brings to mesmerizing life a vibrant, colorful, thrilling, and dangerous New York City in the earliest years of the twentieth century. A novel breathtaking in its scope and ambition, it is the epic saga of newcomers drawn to the promise of America—gangsters and laborers, hucksters and politicians, radicals, reformers, murderers, and sideshow oddities—whose stories of love, revenge, and tragedy interweave and shine in the artificial electric dazzle of a wondrous place called Dreamland.

    Editor's Note

    Detailed & engrossing…

    Kaleidoscopic in scope and emotion, this epic tale of New York City at the turn of the century is historical fiction at its best: detailed and compelling, informative and engrossing, and always powerfully rooted in its time and place.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061983733
    Author

    Kevin Baker

    Kevin Baker is the bestselling author of the novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Sometimes You See It Coming. He is a columnist for American Heritage magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Harper's, and other periodicals. He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Ellen Abrams, and their cat, Stella.

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    Reviews for Dreamland

    3.5/5

    118 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It makes sense that a historian like Kevin Baker would write something as epic and sweeping as Dreamland. It is a beautifully blended tale of fiction and reality. Events like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and people like Sigmund Freud and politics like Tammany Hall exist in harmony with fictional Coney Island gangsters and seedy carnival performers. It's a world of underground rat fights, prostitution, gambling, and the sheer violent will to survive. It's dirty and tragic. A love story hidden behind the grime, the colorful lights, the tricks, and the chaotic noise of New York.
    • 5/5
      Set in New York City of the early Twentieth Century, Baker's novel draws on the actual immigrant history of the time and strips off the romantic veneer to show us the ugly truth of the times. People were routinely exploited, politics was corrupt, the police were corrupt and the American Dollar was king. Set in the middle of all this, Baker gives us some incredibly complex characters, some modeled after real life people of the times, and follows them through their daily lives.Not a kind picture of our American roots, but still an important glimpse in to the past nonetheless. Suggested for those with a taste for off beat (but real life) characters, a taste for historical fiction or an interest in one of the great industrial tragedies of the early Twentieth Century.
    • 3/5
      Kevin Baker's sweeping 1999 novel "Dreamland" has dozens of characters and, fortunately, a list of those characters at the beginning of the book to help readers tell who is who. Several of the characters in this story that takes place in New York City during the summer of 1909 are real people, including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who were visiting the United States that summer, and Thomas A. Edison.Because there are so many characters and so many subplots, a summary of the novel is difficult. Women working long hours for low wages in the garment district try to organize a union. One Jewish gangster is hiding from another Jewish gangster on Coney Island and happens to fall in love with the other gangster's sister. A Tammany Hall leader tries to hold the corrupt organization together as he gradually goes mad because of venereal disease. Dwarfs flock to Coney Island to live in the Little City, built to scale for one of their number, the Mad Carlotta, to rule as queen.There's a lot going on here, but it makes fascinating reading.
    • 5/5
      Anyone have other suggestions for fiction about Coney Island?
    • 3/5
      This novel set at Coney Island and other sites in New York City in the early 20th Century is as just as concerned with the place and time period as it is with its plot. But there is enough plot to hold it together and it kept my interest. A few characters have some heft, but most seem like representations of a type.
    • 4/5
      Dreamland, titled after the Coney Island amusement park of the same name that was in its heyday at the time, starts with a tale from Trick the Dwarf about a bizarre twist of fate and the love story that resulted. The story then mushrooms out to take in the points of view of a couple notorious New York City gangsters, a factory girl involved in early union activity, a prostitute, a Tammany Hall politician, and, oddly enough, Dr. Sigmund Freud. With these characters, Kevin Baker vividly brings to life the downtown New York of the early 1900s, plagued by crime and poverty but also somehow larger than life and full of possibility. He was astonished, for the first time, to see how many people there were and how fast they were moving. Straddling each avenue were high steel girders, pylons holding up the trains that raced madly through the night, sometimes two at a time, in opposite directions, until they made the whole street shake. It was a frantic, crowded, nightmare world that he could not wait to join.Baker's gangsters are based on real historical gang members, with their stories tweaked and their lives and motives re-humanized. These gangsters disappoint their parents, immigrate from Eastern Europe in search of a better life that never seems to materialize. They care for their sisters and their lovers, all in between killing and maiming. Naturally, there is a love story, and a good one at that, between an exiled gangster and the girl he meets on Coney Island. There is no small amount of crooked politicking. There is disturbing violence, both random, provoked, and shocking, in the case of the early labor movement. With Dreamland, Baker paints a picture of a city struggling through its many growing pains and trying to come of age. While there were definitely some storylines I could have easily done without (adios doctors Freud and Jung - what are you guys doing here anyway?), I was, for the most part, totally taken in by Dreamland and its gritty, larger than life portrait of New York City at a pivotal point in history. Baker ably breathes life into each of his many characters and marches them steadily toward an explosive conclusion that expertly weaves many narrative strands into one pivotal day on Coney Island. "A magnified Prater," he sniffed to Ferenczi and Brill, referring to the cheesy midway in the Vienna park - but the Prater was like a summer garden party compared to this. Everything louder, bigger, more hysterical - more American.
    • 3/5
      I finished reading this book just as the tv programme Boardwalk Empire aired in the UK. The book tells the tales of a colourful variety of characters in the post-depression era, all connected by Dreamland amusement park at Coney Island. There is a politician, a gangster, a female immigrant and Trick the Dwarf, a performer at the amusements.For me the book belonged to Esse, daughter of Eastern European immigrants and an underpaid seamstress in The Triangle - a hazardous factory. She takes trips to Coney Island every Sunday to escape her homelife, and one week meets a handsome stranger. She doesn't yet know about his connections, nor he hers.The historical research that's gone into the book is very evident, and that alone would make me recommend it to others. Strange to be reminded of a time when food and material possessions were hard fought for. I haven't yet watched Boardwalk Empire, but I hope it's every bit as good as Dreamland.
    • 3/5
      Beautifully written historical novel that reall gives a sense of New York in the early 20th. Unfortunately the climax is a bit of a let down. Still, well worth reading.
    • 5/5

      Dreamland is a long book with a complicated plot. Parts of it go in circles, looping back around to come up again. But in the end, everything, or almost everything wraps up into one tight plot. Except for the Great Head Doctors from Vienna – Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and a couple of others. They apparently did make a journey to America in the general time period, and the story has them wandering by, sightseeing, at a couple of the scenes of action of the main story. But primarily they are doing their own thing and neither affect nor are affected by the main events of the story to any great extent.

      It is a story of the early twentieth century. There are gangsters, Tammany politicians, sweatshop workers, whores, and Coney Island freaks. There are drinking and gambling in the most disgusting of Bowery bars, shows in the Coney Island amusement parks, murder, an opium den, abuse – physical and sexual – of young girls in garment factories, and several fires.

      The story or at least part of it is narrated by a character called Trick the Dwarf who lived for a time in the Dreamland amusement park, one of at least three amusement parks on Coney Island. But the main characters are Esther Abromowitz and her boyfriend, Kid Twist. I liked the description of Esther’s early work experience, from being virtually sold to work in a cramped attic hand-sewing coats when she was still practically a child through several other equally demeaning sorts of sewing jobs to finally working at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. There is a long stretch about union activities during her time at the Triangle factory. After the worst of the drama between Kid Twist and Gyp the Blood (who is really Esther’s brother Lazar) is finished, Trick the Dwarf professes not to know what happened to Esther and Kid. But if they did not leave the city, and if Esther did not take up working professionally for the union, she was set up perfectly to return to the Triangle factory. If that happened, she was then in a perfect position to die in the famous fire that subsequently struck that establishment killing over a hundred people due in large part to the foolish policies of the owners.

      The book was a little difficult to get into at first, but as the relationship between the characters became clearer, it got better.