The Big Crowd
Kevin Baker, 2013
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
424 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618859900
Summary
From “the lit world’s sharpest chronicler of New York’s past” (Rolling Stone), a novel of two Irish brothers who travel from the gangland waterfront to the halls of power.
Based on one of the great unsolved murders in mob history, and the rise-and-fall of a real-life hero, The Big Crowd tells the sweeping story of Charlie O’Kane. He is the American dream come to life, a poor Irish immigrant who worked his way up from beat cop to mayor of New York at the city’s dazzling, post-war zenith. Famous, powerful, and married to a glamorous fashion model, he is looked up to by millions, including his younger brother, Tom. So when Charlie is accused of abetting a shocking mob murder, Tom sets out to clear his brother’s name while hiding a secret of his own.
The charges against Charlie stem from his days as a crusading Brooklyn DA, when he sent the notorious killers of Murder, Inc., to the chair—only to let a vital witness go flying out a window while under police guard. Now, out of office, Charlie lives in a shoddy, Mexico City tourist hotel, eaten up with regrets and afraid he will be indicted for murder if he returns to the U.S. To uncover what really happened, Tom must confront stunning truths about his brother, himself, and the secret workings of the great city he loves.
Moving from the Brooklyn waterfront to city hall, from the battlefields of World War II to the beaches of Acapulco, to the glamorous nightclubs of postwar New York, The Big Crowd is filled with historical powerbrokers and gangsters, celebrities and socialites, scheming cardinals and battling, dockside priests. But ultimately it is a brilliantly imagined, distinctly American story of the bonds and betrayals of brotherhood. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 1958
• Where—Englewood, New Jersey, USA
• Raised—Rockport, Massachusetts
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Awards—James Fenimore Cooper Prize; American
Book Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Kevin Baker is an American novelist and journalist. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey and grew up in New Jersey and Rockport, Massachusetts.
As a youth he worked on the Gloucester Daily Times, covering school-boy sports, as well as local town meetings and other civic affairs. He graduated from Columbia University, where he majored in political science, in 1980.
Baker is the author of the City of Fire trilogy, which consists of the following historical novels: Dreamland (1999); the bestselling Paradise Alley (2002); and Strivers Row (2006). The middle volume of the trilogy was the winner of the 2003 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction and the American Book Award.
He has also written a contemporary baseball novel, called Sometimes You See it Coming (1993), and a graphic novel called Luna Park (2009). Baker was chief historical researcher on Harold Evans’s illustrated history of the United States, The American Century (1999). He is also the author of The Story of Us, the companion book to the History Channel 2010 series, and wrote the new final chapter for the reissue of Baseball, the companion book to Ken Burns' 1994 10-part series, Baseball, which has aired on public television.
Baker resides in New York, where he is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine. He was formerly a columnist for "In the News" in American Heritage magazine, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and New York Times Book Review. Baker appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and The Colbert Report in the summer of 2009, to discuss the Barack Obama Presidency. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/11/2014.)
Book Reviews
succeeds in creating a compelling imagined world. Most of the telling is through dialogue, and Baker's re-creation of the cadences and diction of another time is impressive…Best of all, the novel delivers on what the title promises, a detailed rendering of the relationships within that era's power cabal…I've read few other novels that portray in such a nuanced way the temptations of power, the complex division of control in a great metropolis and the perils of political deal-making in that environment. Baker doesn't like the Big Crowd any more than Tom O'Kane does, but, fortunately for us, he understands its workings very well.
Scott Turow - New York Times Book Review
With The Big Crowd, Kevin Baker earns the title of Best American Historical Novelist—heck, maybe best American novelist, period. This inspired, fun, serious, thought-provoking, page-turning book gives all the good, old pleasures: if you read it on the subway, be prepared to miss your stop. But Baker also raises the key questions about New York, about America, about who we are. Charlie and Tom O'Kane are characters for the ages." —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
Associated Press
Baker takes an all-but-forgotten crime—the William O’Dwyer case—and builds a novel as big and as blustery as the city it portrays. This sprawling saga traces the spectacular rise and fall of two Irish immigrant brothers during the course of the first half of the twentieth century.... Baker takes another juicy bite out of the Big Apple, demonstrating once again that nobody does old New York—in all its glamour and its grit—better. --Margaret Flanagan
Booklist
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