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Dreamland, by Kevin Baker
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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.
- Sales Rank: #233435 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-10-06
- Released on: 2009-10-06
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com 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
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (LJ 7/75) was a dazzling tour de force, particularly his imaginative mingling of the fictional and historical in his story of turn-of-the-century New York. Occupying the same time and space and employing the same device of mixing the historical and the fictional, Baker's Dreamland will inevitably be compared to Ragtime, but it is very different?more personal and less political. Narrated by a diverse group of characters?two Jewish gangsters, a seamstress, a whore, a Tammany Hall politician, Sigmund Freud, a dwarf from Coney Island?the novel looks at the ways we see ourselves, often distorted as if through a funhouse mirror. Events like a garment workers' strike, the gangland murder of a talkative gambler, and the fire that burned Coney Island's Dreamland swirl together in this larger-than-life story of people trying to understand themselves in a New York that seems out of control. With its fluid narrative and finely realized characters, Dreamland belongs in most libraries.
-?Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Every bit as entertaining as "The Alienist."
By Mary Reese
After I had read "The American Century" and found that Kevin Baker was responsible for the bulk of the research on that fine book, I wanted to read his new work of historical fiction, "Dreamland." I'm glad I did. Not since I read Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" a few years ago, have I enjoyed a novel as much as this one. Baker is able to bring the reader nearly to tears as he details the travails of young women trying to make it from day to day in New York, either as workers in one of the sweatshops on the lower east side or, unfortunately as one of the prostitutes every night putting her life in jeapordy in the Tenderloin or on the other mean streets of that heartless, corrupt, and sad, very sad city. The section detailing the days spent in jail by the striking women is especially chilling. The inclusion of Freud and Jung is compelling not so much for the interpretation of their work, but rather for the hint of progress that would be made in the years to come in the field of psychoanalysis. Other critics have harped on their inclusion in this work, but I found their conversations stimulating. How they end up in Dreamland at the end of the book with the other colorful and larger than life characters in this inspired work-Kid Twist, Gyp The Blood, the Mad Carlotta, Esther, Trick the Dwarf, Tim Sullivan-is deliciously presented. I thought that the inclusion of Frances Perkins as the sole upper class liberal fighting vainly with limited success to stem the tide of worker abuse allowed the author to speak through her character and graphically describe the carnage enveloping the poor young ladies of that era. No wonder FDR made her his only Secretary of Labor. I thought it ironic that a scant thirty years after the time of this novel, this same age group of women, imprisoned in 1912 for having the gall to ask for a 54 hour work-week, formed the nucleus of the manufacturing force that produced all the armament that saved our world from tyranny and made it safe for democracy during World War II. It is never fair to give away the ending of a book, and I won't. But, trust me, you'll love it!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Terrific read!
By Ron Slaughter
This is not a light, summer read. This is a hypnotic, huge evocation of a terrible time in the history of New York City, populated with downtrodden workers, murderous thugs, treacherous politicians, every sort of exploitation and crime. Also, the first, trepidacious steps toward reform. And, of course, the obligatory aliens (in this case, alienists) in the persons of Freud and Jung, to bring a European perspective to the scene. An amazing work of historical fiction by Kevin Baker.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Fragmented
By Shelby
What do a dwarf, a factory girl, Freud, and some gangsters have in common? Very little. In general, I don't mind alternating narration but in this case it was a burden. Jumping between characters and time lines, even within the chapter, it was unclear what was happening when and to whom. The storylines are supposed to intertwine, but there wasn't enough connection between the stories to make it a success. Dreamland is another novel with potential that needed more polish.
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