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    Dreamland
    Dreamland
    Dreamland
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    Dreamland

    Written by Kevin Baker

    Narrated by John Rubinstein

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    This is Dreamland, a uniquely fierce and magical tale that delivers both a sweeping chronicle of America at the turn of the century and an intimate, heart-wrenching portrait of the lives of its denizens. Among the thousands of immigrants who arrive in New York harbor is an Eastern European stowaway called Kid Twist, who soon earns his keep as an enforcer for the ruthless gangster Gyp the Blood. Soon though, Kid brutally splits with Gyp, leaving him bleeding from a shovel wound to the head in a rancid basement on the Lower East Side. His life now in jeopardy, Kid flees to Brooklyn, finding asylum with a Coney Island carny known as Trick the Dwarf.

    While hiding out, Kid meets young Esther Abramowitz, a shirtwaist seamstress who labors under inhumane conditions. As their love affair blossoms, Esther emerges from quiet shop worker to foot soldier in the burgeoning labor movement. Changed by love, Kid, too, is no longer the ruthless scavenger he once was, as he prepares for an electrifying showdown with the vengeful Gyp the Blood.

    Kevin Baker's deftly imagined blend of meticulous historical research and assured narrative invention recreates a world bursting at the seams, a world of freak shows, cataclysmic exhibitions, mad dwarves, and bathing beauties. In prose that is at once ferocious and breathtakingly lyrical, Dreamland weaves a richly layered tapestry that captures perfectly the emotional and psychological essence of the American experience at the dawn of a new age.

    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
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateApr 4, 2006
    ISBN9780060886769
    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

    113 ratings9 reviews

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    • 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.
    • 3/5
      I read this book some years back because I had read another of the author's books, Sometimes You See It Coming, and enjoyed it. This one was written well enough, but I didn't enjoy it near as much, maybe because the story wasn't that interesting to me. I get sick of all of man's political corruption.

      As I remember it, this book was a well researched and inventive narrative with the arc of the story a popular criminal trial of the period (early twentieth century), with much of the action taking place at Dreamland amusement park in Coney Island. The criminal trial being about Tammany Hall police corruption. Many of the characters and events in Dreamland are purported to be based on real, historical accounts and people.
    • 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.
    • 5/5
      Anyone have other suggestions for fiction about Coney Island?
    • 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
      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
      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.