Dreamland

This book's edition opens with pages of praise from very respectable nationwide sources. Pretty tough to live up to, but Dreamland meets and surpasses every word of them. It's an absolutely awesome (in the purest meaning of the word) novel, an epic, a powerhouse. It is exactly what a work of histori......more

I picked up this book because I love stories of early 1900s especially in New York. Being a native New Yorker, I am somewhat nostalgic towards Coney Island in the face of all the constant attempts at revival and renovation. This book opened my eyes to a Coney Island unlike any I've ever imagined - a......more

In dreamland, even America was possible. Kevin Baker’s spectacular new novel is often more a nightmare than a dream, but I didn’t want to wake up. Trick the Dwarf, a Coney Island circus performer, opens the novel by claiming, “I know a story,” and does he ever. “It is a story about a great city, and a......more

A very interesting historical novel set in New York City in the early twentieth century. We see the amusement parks of Coney Island, the gangs, the Jewish tenements, the garment sweatshops, and the Tammany Hall political machine through the eyes of both real and fictional characters involved, such a......more

So it took better than a month for me to finish this rambling, historical tale about New York and Coney Island at the advent of the 20th century. When Baker wrote about Dreamland and Luna Park and Steeplechase, those wondrous marvels of Coney Island, I was entertained. I was less entertained by the p......more