Rating: 
Summary: Disapointing
Review: I was so excited when I found this book. I have always had a fascination for old New York, it's culture and it's people. While some of the parts describing Coney Island and the lower east side were very interesting, the author lost me when he introduced Freud and Jung to this story. I found myself saing "oh please" more than once while reading these parts. If you find this book in your library, take it out. Otherwise you may want to save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: An epic historical novel
Review: Like the best epic historical novels, Kevin Baker's Dreamland is rich in both history and compelling characters. I can't think of a better way to understand New York in 1912 than reading this book. Dreamland gives us a look at carnivals, tenements, unions, crime, women's issues, immigration, working conditions and more.
Dreamland follows a group of characters (many based in on actual people) unraveling their stories and bringing them together for a satisfying climax.
Dreamland is long but only because it has to be, there's not a bit of excess here.
Baker is both a skilled historian and writer of prose.
Great fun.
Rating: 
Summary: Coney Island as symbol of America's struggle for an identity
Review: Baker's Dickensian epic history of turn-of-the-century New York captures the essense of our identity crisis...we are poor, rich, kind, ruthless, assimilated, ethnic...and we're all jostling for our place in the sun. The author ingeniusly links two major fires in the city's history: the fire that destroyed the Dreamland amusement park (a sign of our lost innocence), and the fire that killed hundreds of young immigrant seamstresses in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a fire which (ironically) hardened the working poor's steely resolve to sieze their constitutionally guaranteed right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These are big ideas, communicated through the eyes and experiences of a huge cast of both real and ficticious characters, all well-rendered, and human in their foibles, heroic in their strengths. To read it is to see the fabled melting pot for what it really is, an immense collision of old and new, haves and have-nots, pure and corrupt, innocent and jaded, orthodox and iconoclast. A fascinating, touching, and well constructed diarama of America at her most volatile.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed, heavy bag
Review: At it's best, Dreamland reveals that Baker knows his New York, can spin a scene, repel or fascinate. Unfortunately, the best of Dreamland comes to a sum total of about 70 pages in a novel closer to 700 pages long. It's a sprawling, lazy book, the author attempting to throw everything into his stew pot and getting thoroughly confused in the process. I've never read a work of historical fiction so well researched, so determined to show you the ins and out and anecdotes of a period, that then steps away from the plot itself. I quote from the final pages, "You want an epilgue, but who knows where people go?" Baker seems to miss the point entirely. These aren't people. They are his characters. Therefore, the author should know where they go. To drag a reader through 700 pages and then offer them a definitive absence of resolution reeks of literary trickery in a book that has purported to being big, open and honest. What a disappointment. If the author and editor had sat down and taken their time, perhaps something great might have been carved from this fat turkey. Too often, the reader jars to lines like, "a tram swooped down on them like a bird of prey." Ok, so I haven't taken many trams in my life, but they don't tend to "swoop". Mr Baker hasn't learned to take his foot off the accelerator. He speeds along, obviously without the faintest clue of where he was going. How can that do anything but disappoint?
Rating:
Summary: I didn't want it to end
Review: Gangsters, politicians, carnies, Coney Island, the Lower East Side... even as historical fiction, this book tells us so much about life in the big cities at the turn of the century. A wonderful story with wonderful characters. Could be the rebellious younger brother of Luc Sante's "Low Life." As both a New Yorker and an avid reader, I can't recommend this book enough.
Rating:
Summary: If you liked The Alienist...
Review: ...you will love this book. The characters come alive, and each chapter is centered on a different individual. They're extremely colorful, from a Coney Island circus dwarf in love with a beautiful but insane midget to Big Tim Sullivan, who's busy nailing down his next election to office. The love story between Kid Twist and Esse is touching, but best of all is reading about the lifestyles back then,in all sorts of familiar places (if you're a New Yorker like I am). Spellbinding.
Rating:
Summary: Does a compelling read make up for a disappointing ending?
Review: Fascinating, until the copout involving Essie & Kid Twist. Any ending would have been better than none. The Freud and Jung passages were merely bearable. However, some of the settings, like the rat pit and the prizefight, were remarkable and chilling. None of the other customer reviews mention the demise of the Trick-Mad Carlotta relationship, which I thought, was the most ironic in the book. Finally, the porcupine ending was flat.
Rating:
Summary: Be transported
Review: I usually get bored with long books, and often feel that the author could have told the story in half as many pages. However, this book had me from the beginning and I had no trouble staying interested until the end, even though it weighs in at about 700 pages. Kevin Baker's secret is that he is so familiar with the historicl setting that he is able to write in such detail that you literally feel tranported to turn-of-the-century New York. The reader gets to know the characters and care about them, even the more eccentric ones. The story about the harshness of life is at times sad, funny, endearing, and even frightening. All 700 pages are worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Coney Island
Review: This book was well written. the subject matter was interesting to me the characters were real and well thought out. The midget was fasinating,I thought it was neet that he lived in the elephants arse.
Rating:
Summary: Just to reinforce the consensus...
Review: After 37 reviews have been posted, there isn't much left to say, but having devoting several days to getting through this brick of a novel, I wanted to add my voice to the chorus. The book is good -- but it isn't great, and deep down you know it isn't even very good. Read Henry Roth's CALL IT SLEEP and Doctorow's RAGTIME and you'll see what Baker's work is a charming but very clearly lesser imitation of. It's like the difference between Elvis and an Elvis impersonator -- same hair, same suit, but one's a great original and one's just a guy hoping to evoke memories of a great original by putting on a familiar wig and suit. The book could have been 100 pages shorter without harming anything -- how many times, for heaven's sake, do we have to read a character's thoughts about the "perfect breasts" of the angel painted above the front gate to Dreamland? Fine, they're big, they're gorgeous, we get the point. How many times do we have to read "STEEPLECHASE -- FUNNY PLACE"? How many times do we have to see the dwarf poke some hapless park-goer with his electric cattle prod? More than once, yes, but 5 or 6 times? The Freud and Jung scenes should all have been left on the cutting room floor. Especially the last one -- the novel would have been better ending on the last Trick the Dwarf scene rather than with the anticlimactic and obvious porcupine joke. Gyp the Blood starts out as a serious antagonist -- but then Baker seriously undercuts him by having him foiled in every scene after the first. Making him a hapless oaf doesn't improve the book. The perspective isn't as rigorously consistent as it ought to be in a book that labels every chapter with a viewpoint character's name. And the "you decide what happened" ending is a disappointment -- you've been waiting for the Triangle fire all through the book, especially after the opening scene has Trick saying "Most of all the story is about fire," you've been teased with the mock tenement fire in Coney Island and the "crying wolf" in the sweatshop Esse works in before Triangle, so the tacking on of the Triangle scene as almost an afterthought at the end feels contemptuous of the reader, almost turning the book into one big shaggy dog story. Not a bad book, I'm not sorry to have read it, but jeez, don't compare it to the great New York immigrant novels. There's just no comparison.
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