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by Kevin Baker
In a word (or two or three): why am i always drawn to these carnie
books?
From Mr. Hipster:
There's something about early New York
society that just fascinates me. The lawlessness, brutality and
utter hopelessness are in such odd contrast to the city today
with its sparkling buildings, $2000 suits and lack of roving Irish
gangs. This is the New York in which my grandparents grew up.
Granted, Grandpa Jack was a mere babe, and neither a gangster
nor a carnie, but I'm sure he fit in somewhere in this book about
Jewish, Irish and, um, carnie immigrants. Like most of the early
New York historical fiction novels before it, the author's fictional
characters are interwoven with real characters of the time. Some
of the most interesting pieces of this book are the interactions
of the local politicians and state politicians. The state politicians
seemed to play a much larger role in the goings-on of the city
back then. Can you even name your state senator? The politicians
hire the gangsters to intimidate constituents, do away with ballot
boxes and basically strong-arm whoever they need to sway--all
without getting their hands directly dirty. Everyone was a pawn
in the political machine, and it seemed that everyone suffered
but the ones who were running the machine. Baker shows, through
one of his main characters and the sweatshops in which she worked,
the rise of unions in the city, and the fight for the rights of
women and children. Of course, Dreamland, an amusement park out
in Coney Island, represents the magical mystery of the "new world"
and everything these immigrants imagined the United State would
be. In stark contrast were the tenement buildings that they lived
in, and often died in. This dreamland is, of course, merely a
fantasy, and not the true world that they were expecting. Anyway,
it's an allegory. So, the book, while relatively entertaining,
spreads itself a little too thin between several characters, all
in an attempt to bring them together at the end of the story in
a Robert Altman kind of crescendo. Maybe Baker should have split
the book up into several different shorter books, and had one
about the old amusement parks, and one about the politics of early
New York, and one about the unions (although I believe that HBO
movie, Iron Jawed Angels may have covered most of the territory
he covers in this book), and even one about the gangs of New York.
(Oh, I guess that's been covered too.) Anyhow, the book was certainly
worth the read, but be prepared to be glad when it finally wraps
up.
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