Kevin Baker Books In Order

City of Fire Trilogy Books In Order

  1. Paradise Alley (2002)
  2. Dreamland (1999)
  3. Strivers Row (2006)

Novels

  1. Sometimes You See It Coming (1993)
  2. The Big Crowd (2013)

Chapter Books

  1. Luna Park (2009)

Non fiction

  1. America the Ingenious (2016)

City of Fire Trilogy Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Chapter Books Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Kevin Baker Books Overview

Paradise Alley

At the height of the Civil War, what begins with strong words and a few broken bottles will, over the course of five days, escalate into the worst urban conflagration in American history. Hundreds of thousands of poor Irish immigrants smolder with resentment against a war and a president that have cost them so many of their young men. When word spreads throughout New York’s immigrant wards that a military draft is about to be implemented a draft from which any rich man’s son with $300 can buy an exemption trouble begins to spill into the streets. Down in the waterfront slum of Paradise Alley, three women Deirdre Dolan O’Kane, Ruth Dove, and Maddy Boyle struggle with their private fears as they wait for the storm to descend on them. Deirdre, whose lace curtain sensibilities have always kept her at arm’s length from her neighbors, is devastated by the discovery that her husband, Tom, has been wounded at Gettysburg. In her desperation, Deirdre must turn for aid and comfort to Ruth, a woman she has always judged as morally depraved. Ruth, too, has been cut off from her husband, Billy Dove, an ex slave. At dawn he set out for the Colored Orphans’ Asylum uptown, to collect his last wages. But he has not returned by day’s end, or by the next morning. In the meantime, Ruth has learned that dozens of black men and women have been lynched or beaten by rioters. She begins to fear the worst, not just for Billy, but for herself and their children, too because she now knows that he is coming. He is Dangerous Johnny Dolan, Deirdre’s estranged brother, who after fourteen years’ exile has returned to New York. Years before, it was Johnny who saved Ruth from the famine in Ireland, who arranged for her steerage passage from Dublin to New York and who beat her mercilessly until she arranged to have him sent away for murder. Even as the riot builds toward its violent climax, Dolan searches relentlessly for Ruth and Deirdre, carried along by the unruly mob. In the end, these remarkable women have nothing but one another to rely on as they seek to protect their homes and families from the brutality of a city and a nation gone mad. Paradise Alley a story of race and hatred, of love and war, of risk and dauntless courage.

Dreamland

‘If Paris is France, Coney Island, between June and September, is the world.’ George C. Tilyou, entrepreneur, circa 1905 From the decks of a steamship that brings Sigmund Freud to America for a lecture tour, hundreds of European immigrants strain for a glimpse of the promised land. As they approach, they see New York, the city of their dreams, being consumed by flames. But as they draw nearer, their despair turns to amazement as they realize their searing image of the New World is really the magical radiance of a million incandescent lights at Coney Island’s Dreamland amuseme*nt parka sight so spectacular, so unearthly, they are sure they can only be passing through the gates of heaven…
. or hell. This is the New York of Dreamland, a uniquely fierce and magical novel 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. When Kid is pressed to murder an informer in a police corruption investigation that threatens to bring down the powerful political machine of Tammany Hall, Kid brutally splits with Gyp, leaving him bleeding from a shovel wound to the head in a rancid baseme*nt on the Lower East River to Brooklyn, finding asylum with a Coney Island carny known as Trick the Dwarf. While hiding in Coney Islandin a tin roofed hotel built in the shape of a giant elephantKid Twist meets young Esther Abramowitz, a shirtwaist seamstress who labors under inhuman conditions to support a frail mother and embittered father. As their love affair blossoms, Esther emerges from quiet shopworker to foot soldier in the burgeoning labor movement in the days leading to the cataclysmic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. 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, the police corruption case intensifies, wreaking havoc for ruthless Tammany Hall politician Big Tim Sullivan, who sees his control over this raw, dynamic city slowly slipping away. 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, scientific wonders, cataclysmic exhibitions, mad dwarves, bathing beauties, diving horses, hootchy kootchy dancers, and dreaming geniuses. 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.

Strivers Row

Summer 1943. Harlem is a never ending carnival in the second year of the war. Yet underneath the glitter, its black residents remain second class citizens, and the neighborhood is a tinderbox, waiting for a match. Along these restless streets, two very different young men will cross paths. Their chance encounter will change both of their lives, and presage the battle for civil rights that is to come. Malcolm Little is a naive, cocky, troubled teenager and not yet the iconic civil rights leader Malcolm X. The Rev. Jonah Dove is the minister of one of Harlem’s greatest churches, and lives in the blocks known as Strivers Row. Their lives intersect when Malcolm rescues Jonah and his wife from a group of drunken white soldiers. For Jonah, it is a crowning indignity that brings on a crisis of faith. But Malcolm, haunted by his own past, temporarily forgets the incident and plunges ecstatically into the nightlife of Harlem yet he finds it hollow at the core. Lonely and confused, he starts to have odd dreams and visions the beginning of a religious conversion that will overthrow his whole world. As race riots break out across the homefront, and Harlem slides toward the brink, Jonah and Malcolm must confront their own demons. Their next meeting, in the midst of turmoil, will lead them both to make fateful choices, for themselves and for their people. Completing his ‘City of Fire’ trilogy, master storyteller Kevin Baker has once again woven an epic tale set against the panoramic backdrop of a vanished New York. Bold and exciting, evocative and unique, Strivers Row sets a new standard for modern historical fiction.

Sometimes You See It Coming

Based in part on the life of baseball legend Ty Cobb, this book belongs in the pantheon of great baseball novels. John Barr is the kind of player who isn’t supposed to exist anymore. An all around superstar, he plays the game with a single minded ferocity that makes his New York Mets team all but invincible. Yet Barr himself is a mystery with no past, no friends, no women, and no interests outside hitting a baseball as hard and as far as he can. Not even Ellie Jay, the jaded sportswriter who can out think, out drink, and out write any man in the press box. She wants to think she admires Barr’s skill on a ballfield, but suspects she might be in love with a man who isn’t really there. Barr leads the Mets to one championship after another. Then chaos arrives in the person of new manager Charli Stanzi, well known psychopath. Under Stanzi’s tutelage, the team simply falls apart. Then Barr himself inexplicably starts to unravel. For the first time in his life, his formidable skills fail him, and only Ellie Jay and another can help if he will let them. Hanging in the balance are his sanity, the World Series, and true love.

Luna Park

Alik is a former Soviet soldier who has relocated to Coney Island only to become a gangland enforcer. He’s haunted by memories of his past, and the only thing that soothes his angst is booze, hero*in and his lover, the prostitute Marina. But as much as Alik encourages her to break away from the ganglord who owns her, Marina can’t because of her daughter, who never leads the ganglord’s side. So Alik comes up with a desperate plan to save all three of them, and in doing so, he’ll find he’s destined to repeat the past over and over again, including a past or two he might not even be aware he has, in a story that flashes from present- day run down Coney Island to the Russia of 10 years ago during the Second Chechen War to turn of the 20th century Coney Island, when the area was at its peak amuseme*nt park glory and wonder.

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