Strivers Row

I read this book for my book club, and I felt it was a powerful look at history and race. The injustices faced by the characters to be utterly gut-wrenching, and knowing that this is based on true life only makes it harder. An important and wonderfully written book.

This is a stellar weaving of fictional characters and historical characters; and of fictional story telling amid historical events. Baker deftly transports the reader into the period, and into the lives, thoughts and dreams of his characters. I have not read the previous two books in Kevin Baker's series, but I will search them out now! I loved this book!

For six years and three books, Baker has been building, brick by brick, his own city, and it is a classic. With Striver's Row, the high-rises are inhabited, the streets are paved, the corners are teeming. You see how the country came together, and you understand that the world of books has been resting in sure hands. Baker has a detective's eye and a preservationist's heart: but most of all, he has a writer's head, and the proof is on every page. This book tops off a trilogy, but Striver's can be read alone; if it were a first novel, it'd be a cause for celebration. As the end of a series, it's an occassion for gratitude.

I've been a Kevin Baker fan since his brilliant book about Coney Island: Dreamland. His next one, Paradise Alley, may have been even better. No one writes about New York City as well as Baker does -- no novelist, no historian, no one. This new book is a novel about Harlem in the era of jazz greats and secret cults, the era of war and hope. I think it's his most ambitious work yet -- it tells the sotry of young Malcolm X, in the days before he was famous, and -- better than anything I know of about the man -- it gets at the heart of a great American engima. There are other great characters, too --- The Reverend Jonah Dove, who may be a real life figure, as well (I don't know) -- but the story itself is so riveting, I was totally into the book from page one. Anyway, I really recomend it. The dude can write.

Kevin Baker has already proven himself to be a master of modern historical fiction with Dreamland and Paradise Alley. Now, he completes his City of Fire trilogy with the unforgettable Strivers Row, the story of a time as reflected in the lives of two men, Malcolm and Jonah. We first meet Malcolm when he's still a boy after his mother has been taken ill. He is out hunting for hares with Mr. Gohannas and others. He describes the group by saying, "All of them darker than he was, their skin the color of burnt coffee or railroad coal, faces lined and creased like worn car seats. Wearing their field overalls and work boots, redolent with the scent of men's sweat and dirt. Some of them with their boys next to them -- wearing their handed-down overalls; faces exactly the same only smoother, as if all the creases had been ironed out. Their ragged hair knotted up in burrs and tangles, like the farmers they were and would always be." As a 12-year-old Malcolm may be unfamiliar with how to use a .22, but he's clever and soon figures out the path that the frightened hares always take when rousted by the dogs. Soon, he's off by himself shooting the frightened creatures as they run, bagging more than any of the others. When he reaches adulthood he remembers the rabbits, as an adult he is civil rights leader Malcolm X. Set in Harlem in 1943 the scene is one of trouble waiting to happen. At this time Malcolm is young, self-important, without direction. Reverend Jonah Dove is the minister of one of the largest churches in Harlem and lives in the heart of that area known as Striver's Row. Fate steps in when it is Malcolm who saves Jonah and his wife from the brutal hands of some drunken white soldiers. For Malcolm this is something he soon forgets; the assault and rescue affects Jonah quite differently. However, despite the pleasures he enjoys Malcolm has never found peace within himself, which haunts him and brings about a dramatic change in his thinking. Yet life is about to be changed for many as race riots begin and before long Malcolm and Jonah are thrown together once again. Each must confront this devastation in his own way. Baker's description of the Harlem that was with the Apollo Theater and vendors selling trinkets on street corners is so intensely real that one can almost hear the sounds and feel the tension. Thomas Anthony Penny offers a fine voice performance, becoming by turns a self indulgent man who battles racism in his own way and a minister who could pass for white and is often unsure of exactly where he belongs. All the while Penny recreates a pivotal era in American history with his attention to the nuances of Baker's story. - Gail Cooke