Rating: 
Summary: Paradise Alley
Review: This is an excellent book, which not only covers a little-known facet of 19th century history but has definite literary credentials.In the summer of 1863, poor, mostly Irish, workers in New York resent the mounting Civil War casualties, and hate the recently instituted draft. When the government tries to impose the draft, riots erupt that affect the lives of a vivid cast of characters. Baker writes in a literary but not pretentious style. This is Kantor-type historical fiction: following many characters and giving details of each person's past. Some readers will probably find this hard to get through; for me, it was effective, giving each character depth and ratcheting up the tension as I had to wait to find out what was happening to each person in the "now" plotline. The portrayals of 1863 New York and Famine Ireland are definitely gritty, not to say grotesque, but one gets the feeling that vast and accurate research has been done. Baker's overall grip of battles and soldier mentality seems strong--Fredericksburg is excellent and the mob scenes are powerful--but the most interesting part is really the fire-fighting scene, with the details of the engines and the crews. He writes well about members of several ethnic minorities, presenting them as individuals and giving a vivid cultural picture without resorting to condescension or political correctness. The character of Billy Dove, escaped slave and shipwright, is especially well portrayed.
Rating:
Summary: Well Written and Expertly Researched
Review: This is one of my favorite novels since The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Kevin Baker's attention to detail is prevalent through both the character development and the description of the bloody riots too. Occasionally there is some slogging to be done, through descriptions of Ireland during the blight and some of the character's peripheral journeys. But for those who enjoy history, these descriptions will most liklely add color and only rarely become "work" to get through. Kevin Baker deserves high praise for the apparent amount of work he has put into this novel and for bringing an almost lost episode in New York City and American history back into popular consciousness again. As someone who has studied New York City extensively professionally and academically, I can wholeheartedly say that just about every detail in Paradise Alley is based on some true, albeit sometimes very obscure, bit of truth. The city was as filthy and violent as Kevin Baker makes it out to be and the great mass of its inhabitants at the time were equally, if unbelievably, miserable, ignorant, and generally unpleasant to be around. For the wealthy, then as now, the city was almost incomparable in what it had to offer. For everyone else, it was no small victory just to survive from day to day. Have things really changed all that much?
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book
Review: This is probably one of the best books I have ever read. Understanding going in that I love this particular time and place in American history for interest and interesting characters, but this a very readable, exciting, intriguing, informative book -- structured in a fascinating manner. Baker shifts seamlessly from voice to voice as he moves around his characters. I read this before Dreamland, actually, and thought it was the better of the two. Buy this book. Read it. Then give it to a friend.
Rating: 
Summary: OIde New York, Bloodshed and Hate
Review: This is such a well written book. Although it is very long and very dense, Baker has written an engaging and interesting account of the horrific New York Draft Riots of 1863. He weeves in several themes, all of which fit nicely into a disturbing but enlightening portrait of the greatest city in the world. The atmosphere is set brilliantly by Baker. His descriptions of the squalor and filth of New York tenements is very eye opening. That millions lived like animals in New York City will come as a shock to many modern Americans. Whole neighborhoods were ruled over by criminals and, most prominently, the mob. These groups of thousands of angry and poor men could destroy whole blocks and added to the general atmosphere of violence. The political leadership was hopeplessly corrupt, run by ward captains of the Tammany machine. Millions of immigrants poured in, mostly from Ireland, with little to no possessions. It was a total mess. The mess became a war in 1863. The Civil War was in it's deadliest year and the poor Irish immigrants were feeling it the most. Thousands of Irish were being killed all across America. In 1863, the Draft was established. This was bad enough, but the war was sparked by a nefarious caviat to the law. If you could pay 300 dollars, you could get out of the draft, which protected the upper class from having to participate. Making the matter worse was the vicious racism many of the poor Irish felt for the blacks in the city. They were seen as the cause of the war, and were potential competitors for already scarce employment. This hatred is described in a dreary and depressing fashion by Baker, as two unbelievably poor groups fight each other for table scraps. The actual riots themselves are written in near apocalyptic fashion. Also apocalyptic is the description of the Irish Potato famine, which is tough reading. The inhabitants of these nightmares are well drawn characters, both Irish and black. While some of them are on the whole uninteresting, most are very intriguing. Olde New York in all it's horror, done very well.
Rating:
Summary: Brutal Portrayal
Review: This novel is a brutally frank portrayal of the New York City draft riot of 1863. With flashbacks to the starvation and privation of the Irish during the potato famine and their travails getting to America, Mr. Baker draws a compelling picture of the immigrants and the city. He also sketches the racial hatred the Irish held for the blacks in the city.
Mr. Baker's descriptions are vivid and memorable. Some of his accounts of beatings and torture are sure to stay with the reader for a long long time.
His characters are also portrayed in a sometimes brutally frank manor. The novel is told from the perspective of half a dozen characters, most of whom are Irish. There are an Irish woman (her account includes flashbacks to Ireland) who marries a black man, a violent ne'er-do-well (also subject of flashbacks), a couple who have brought themselves up in the world - he a soldier and she a successful housewife and non-Irish prostitute, reporter (only first person narrative) and the black man.
I had some difficulty at the beginning of the book getting into the flow of the story as the set-up took several chapters since it was told by separate charcters who tales were somewhat slow in coming together in a cohesive manner. After that, the book flows and the writing excellent, especially the descriptive passages.
A caution: only one character is truly sympathetic and that is the black man. You want to root for his Irish wife too, but somehow you just can't. The other characters are nearly impossible to sympathize with which makes this book not a warm cuddly story. Warm and cuddly would not fit the three days of riots on which Mr. Baker focuses, however, so this is certainly not a criticism of the novel.
This book is recommended for a period of serious reading and thought. Not a light beach book by any means.
Rating: 
Summary: Drusilla, You're Not on Cold Mountain
Review: To be honest, I bought this book for two reasons: I love reading about the Civil War, and it (the book, not the war) was on the bargain book table. I picked it up, and it did look mildly interesting. Well, parts of it are "mildly" interesting. I'm a journalism prof, and I love reading about 19th century newspapers, magazines, editors, etc. I've been reading it about a month, and I still haven't finished. Since I read two or three books at a time, I've already reread "Cold Mountain" and a few others. Nonetheless, I will complete it--if I buy a book, I usually will read it unless it's absolutely horrible. (I still maintain "The Gangs of New York" is absolutely the worst book I've ever read. I managed to get through it and lent it to a colleague who gave up in frustration and boredom ad nausea.) I think the problem with "Paradise Alley" is that I really can't relate to any of the characters. They all seem one-dimensional in a non-existent plot. Yes, this book is about the New York draft riots along with the Irish potato famine: the latter I did find interesting since I didn't know very much about it. My initial goal was to finish it before Christmas, then by the end of December. Part of the problem may very well be that I often read on the couch and simply fall asleep.
Rating:
Summary: Vivid details, immense research, but rather weary by the end
Review: Today I finished this novel, and happened across yesterday's Baker's NY Times column (12/26/02) in which he notes that the film "Gangs of NY" isn't really violent enough! I wanted to read the novel before seeing Scorsese's film; Baker's novel, however, delves much more into the riots than does the film--which treats it more as an anticlimax. The Irish are both sympathetically and mercilessly portrayed by Baker, and I respect his ability to keep you caring about the fate of his intertwined characters--even the villains--until the end. I wonder, given the deserved yet unresolved fate of one key character, if this person'll show up in the final volume of this NYC trilogy? Another reviewer mentioned that there isn't much to relieve the violence. Yet this fits such evocations. We look elsewhere than this novel or Scorsese for slapstick. As Baker's column and novel both emphasize, this NYC is amazingly dangerous. How could one walk one block and survive even before the riots? His constant and clever parallels (as drawn by his characters) between the famine, slavery, Civil War and street death, and the riots intertwine well these intricate threads into an engrossing read. thankfully, Baker manages to avoid cliche and sentimentality (except where the latter fits their telling of the story, given the characters' own worldviews and expectations). The recollections of the characters offer great set-pieces: Tom's soldiering, Ruth's famine, Robinson's imagined reporting, and notably Billy Dove's adventures on the sea, his holding off the riot at the orphanage, and the powerfully rendered fate of Colonel O'Brien. I think there could have been more substantially differing "registers" to make the characters' indirectly told narratives more differentiated. Without giving anything away, considering the resolution, I think more liberty could have been taken to dramatize how the story was conveyed through these different figures. Hundreds of pages of musings filtered largely through an omniscient narrator makes for--as in many epic historical novels--lots of detail but a rather plodding form to transmit such rich sources of raw lived experience. Still, Baker's strength lies in particular scenes more than their sum total. As others note, the research weaved into the plot makes history personal and understandable--commendably done and fiction's trump over "plain" scholarship for most of us casually curious about this period. I also wish an endpapers map had been included for those of us not so familiar with their island terrain. Baker describes it vividly, but it's hard to tell just how far, say, Billy Dove's sewer escape or Dangerous Johnny Dolan's mobleading horde took to criscross flaming Manhattan. My only other suggestion: edit down the final hundred or so pages. Perhaps form meets content here, but as the riot ebbs even as the climax nears, the rising energy of the narrative seems to weary instead of surge. Too bad Archbishop "Dagger John" Hughes, creator of St. Patrick's cathedral, here is so doddering; for another take on his role in a similarly-staged (Penguin pbk.,1994) novel exploring black and Irish in the same riots, compare Peter Quinn's excellent "Banished Children of Eve." I see no credit from Baker to Quinn, but Quinn blurbs on the back jacket for Baker! Taken together with the film, you'll have three, well, violent but sensitive views of famine survival, slavery's victims, prejudice, and the ongoing Civil War as seen from the distance of the already congested, teeming city.
Rating:
Summary: Informative
Review: Welcome to Kevin Baker's New York. By 1863 the great metropolis had grown into a cruelly concentrated reflection of the greater nation, offering countless lives the tantalizing prospect of a lift from danger to hope, squalor to prosperity, and slavery to freedom. But 1863 was a singular time in the city's life, as in the country's, a time when the fragile fabric of civilization fell victim to a reckless, violent drive for freedom and survival. It's evident that Kevin Baker has a complicated relationship with New York. His main characters, by turns noble, desperate,
resourceful, feckless, and downright evil, all share a seminal drive for survival that propel them through impossible traumas and betrayals. From Ruth, the Irish peasant girl who runs from starvation in her homeland and washes up on American shores, to her frightening co-hort and erstwhile mate Dangerous Johnny Dolan, to her great love the ex-slave Billy Dove, her sister-inlaw Deirdre, and the cynical journalist Herbert Willis Robinson, each soul has a relationship with the city that either saves or destroys. And in New York, survival is not always the province of the good. Yet through this scrim of ruthlessness the author's affection for the city still shines through. His style of writing, though often subdued and painful, somehow gives voice to the intense possibility of the place. The crucible for his characters' lives, the draft riots of 1863, crack New York wide open and unleash a torrent of horrific violence. Yet by novel's end, despite some of the tragic and unresolved circumstances of the main characters, there's a sense of purging and redemption. The war, the riots, and all the hardships that came before all teach something about the need to strive for good. Historically Baker seems on firm ground with his subject matter, though a lay person might wonder about the author's take on race and repression. In particular, to an uninformed mind the development of the relationship between Billy Dove, the ex-slave, and Ruth, the Irish refugee with a scary and violent boyfriend, seems florid and far-fetched, a bit like "Mandingo" written as Harlequin romance. During these passages Baker loses control, falling back on a style less assured and honest than that displayed througout the rest of the book. It's an uncomfortable passage to read--a little embarassing, like a wrong note passed off as a right one in an otherwise flawless concerto. Some of the book's peripheral stories (i.e. those outside the city's vise) are gripping. Ruth's almost random flight from her starving family's home, her journey through the hell of Ireland's starving countryside, the harrowing journey across the Atlantic in a typhus infested ship with the psychotic, near dead Johnny Dolan--these are some of the most powerful passages in the whole work. This reader has never come in such intimate contact with the carnage and horror of that time. Billy Dove's escape up the East Coast on a makeshift sailboat, pursued by slave traders and sharks, also show Baker at his page-turning best. This book is a labor of love, and love is a complicated thing. Baker brings to it effective writerly instincts, a strong sense of character, and an clear desire to make history live. If it's a long book, it needs to be so. Baker has much to say, and he says it well, leaving the reader enriched, informed, and thoroughly entertained.
Rating:
Summary: Nasty, Brutish, and Long
Review: Welcome to Kevin Baker's New York. By 1863 the great metropolis had grown into a cruelly concentrated reflection of the greater nation, offering countless lives the tantalizing prospect of a lift from danger to hope, squalor to prosperity, and slavery to freedom. But 1863 was a singular time in the city's life, as in the country's, a time when the fragile fabric of civilization fell victim to a reckless, violent drive for freedom and survival. It's evident that Kevin Baker has a complicated relationship with New York. His main characters, by turns noble, desperate,
resourceful, feckless, and downright evil, all share a seminal drive for survival that propel them through impossible traumas and betrayals. From Ruth, the Irish peasant girl who runs from starvation in her homeland and washes up on American shores, to her frightening co-hort and erstwhile mate Dangerous Johnny Dolan, to her great love the ex-slave Billy Dove, her sister-inlaw Deirdre, and the cynical journalist Herbert Willis Robinson, each soul has a relationship with the city that either saves or destroys. And in New York, survival is not always the province of the good. Yet through this scrim of ruthlessness the author's affection for the city still shines through. His style of writing, though often subdued and painful, somehow gives voice to the intense possibility of the place. The crucible for his characters' lives, the draft riots of 1863, crack New York wide open and unleash a torrent of horrific violence. Yet by novel's end, despite some of the tragic and unresolved circumstances of the main characters, there's a sense of purging and redemption. The war, the riots, and all the hardships that came before all teach something about the need to strive for good. Historically Baker seems on firm ground with his subject matter, though a lay person might wonder about the author's take on race and repression. In particular, to an uninformed mind the development of the relationship between Billy Dove, the ex-slave, and Ruth, the Irish refugee with a scary and violent boyfriend, seems florid and far-fetched, a bit like "Mandingo" written as Harlequin romance. During these passages Baker loses control, falling back on a style less assured and honest than that displayed througout the rest of the book. It's an uncomfortable passage to read--a little embarassing, like a wrong note passed off as a right one in an otherwise flawless concerto. Some of the book's peripheral stories (i.e. those outside the city's vise) are gripping. Ruth's almost random flight from her starving family's home, her journey through the hell of Ireland's starving countryside, the harrowing journey across the Atlantic in a typhus infested ship with the psychotic, near dead Johnny Dolan--these are some of the most powerful passages in the whole work. This reader has never come in such intimate contact with the carnage and horror of that time. Billy Dove's escape up the East Coast on a makeshift sailboat, pursued by slave traders and sharks, also show Baker at his page-turning best. This book is a labor of love, and love is a complicated thing. Baker brings to it effective writerly instincts, a strong sense of character, and an clear desire to make history live. If it's a long book, it needs to be so. Baker has much to say, and he says it well, leaving the reader enriched, informed, and thoroughly entertained.
Rating:
Summary: (4.5)The brutality of Paradise Lost
Review: With the passage of the Conscription Law in 1863, the citizens of Manhattan are outraged, since most of them will never have the $300 necessary to buy freedom from service in the Union Army. Mostly Irish immigrants, their daily lives are barely less brutal than the years of hardship suffered during the Potato Famine in the land of their birth. Over a few short but violent days, these men stage a riot that is the largest incident of civil disobedience in United States history, exploding into a marauding mob venting its rage and frustration. Many in their path are killed, the majority hapless blacks made all too visible by their skin color, strung up and gutted, male or female, necessary grist for the giant maw of prejudice. In an era dense with innovation and the complexities of human nature and ambition, these simple men are overwhelmed with the urgency to overcome their desperate circumstances. They yield to the swift justice of mob mentality. Yet their story is sprinkled throughout with the occasional brilliance of innocence in a hopeless world. Mired in the great conflict of mankind's struggle to survive in a fractured and unfair society, one riddled with injustice and depravity, these men daily watch the rich stride over the grasping hands of the destitute, deaf to their cries for help, oblivious to their need. This is a world where wealth and power drive the gears of poverty and the Yellow Brick Road is paved over with the dreams of immigrants and cast-offs. In these short days of incidental violence, the words of one survivor, a prostitute named Maddy, are indicative of the random forces at work: "Men were always disappointed with something. That was the first thing to know about them. They were rarely satisfied, and when they weren't, they liked to blame it on something else- a rich man or woman. God in His infinite mercy... in truth it was all the same, the thing that stopped them. Best not to be mistaken for it." In unsparing prose, Baker tackles all the details, from the devastating famine in Ireland to the senseless torture of innocent blacks by fellow citizens. He portrays three couples to follow through this turmoil, an Irish couple, a mixed race couple and an unmarried couple, each with their own issues. To their lives he adds an unspeakable villain, who has survived life from one inhumanity to the next. It is a scathing story of depravity, frequently painful with detail and memorable for its potent message.
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