4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land

you need to read this book if you've been there before or after the riots. there is a new AP documentary film out that features The Boss that touches on the period, but this book gives the real and detailed story of this amazing place. If you're new to AP, you need to read this book to understand it's joyful yet soulfull and at times bittersweet history and culture.

This book is a great resource. As a person who grew up "down the shore" adjacent to Asbury Park, I've learned a tremendous amount about the area's history. Interesting read with a great level of detail and chapter notes. I had borrowed it from the library but wanted my own copy to add to my shore book collection.

Who knew that the history of a town that I had never heard of in New Jersey would yield such an interesting read? The town is set up in such a way that it resembles some of the seedy racist behaviors that all of us would like to believe don't exist anymore but need to come to terms with. There is plenty of talk about Springsteen, but there is also plenty of well-researched information on the rest of the love-to-hate-'em characters in the town.

I am a Jersey kid by birth. I graduated high school the same year as Bruce Springsteen, but about 50 miles away. It might as well have been 5 million miles. As a kid, there were family trips to the boardwalk at Asbury Park. When I was in high school, there were concerts at Convention Hall. I even dated a girl who's family spent part of the summer in Ocean Grove, but that's a story for another time. To me, Asbury Park was the length and breadth of the beach and boardwalk. It was obvious, even to an infrequent visitor like me, that the city was in terrible decline, but it took this book to explain how and why that happened, and, at the same time, place that experience within a much larger context. The stresses caused by the fundamental dichotomies that Asbury Park was built on are the same ones that challenge much of the U.S. Religion and commerce, racial conflict, the strengths and weaknesses of machine politics, even the tug-of-war of fantasy and reality, they are all in Asbury Park's history, and they are all around us, wherever we are. Those conflicts all took a terrible toll on Asbury Park, just as they all take a toll everywhere. In this book, Daniel Wolff tells us the history of a small place, and in the telling, illuminates larger truths. It is no coincidence that Springsteen's fame grew as he found ways to express his universal themes without tying them to a specific place and time. In his own way, Daniel Wolfe lets us see how and why that happened. As serious as the subject matter is, the book is written in a deftly lighthanded style that makes reading it a completely enjoyable event. Don't miss it.

At its very best biography is social history. That's what Daniel Wolff did so brilliantly with his biography of Sam Cooke, and has done again, this time with the story of a town. Prior to reading this book I had thought of Asbury Park only in passing, and usually in relation to Springsteen. Wolff made me care about Asbury Park and understand it within a much larger scope. My only gripe about Wolff is that he doesn't produce more -- let's face it, he stands among the Ritz of writers.

It's tempting to call this surprising gem of a book "quirky" but for the fact that it addresses themes -- music, religion, race, commerce -- central both to the American dream and reality. From Asbury Park's double-barreled beginnings as a pleasure retreat for the devout, we watch the struggle for the town's soul evolve. Christianity yields to commerce as the town's organizing principle, but, in Asbury's case, economic salvation proves as elusive as the spiritual kind. Out of the gloom arise racial battles and, eventually, a skinny kid with a guitar to put the town back on the map. But can rock 'n roll save Asbury's tortured soul? Wolff's electric description of an Asbury race riot -- at a concert, naturally -- certainly suggests a clue.