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    In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World
    Unavailable
    In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World
    Unavailable
    In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World
    Ebook999 pages9 hours

    In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World

    By Peter Golenbock

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    One of every seven people in the United States can trace their family back to Brooklyn, New York—all seventy-one square miles of it; home to millions of people from every corner of the globe over the last 150 years. Now Peter Golenbock, the author of the acclaimed book Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers, returns to Kings County to collect the firsthand stories of the life and times of the people of Brooklyn—and how they changed the world.

    The nostalgic myth that is Brooklyn is all about egg creams and stickball, and, of course, the Dodgers. The Dodgers left fifty years ago, but Brooklyn is still here—transformed by waves of suburban flight, new immigrants, urban homesteaders, and gentrification. Deep down, Brooklyn has always been about new ideas—freedom and tolerance paramount among them—that have changed the world, all the way back to Lady Deborah Moody, who escaped religious persecution in both Old and New England, and founded Coney Island and the town of Gravesend in the 1600s.

    So why was Jackie Robinson embraced by Brooklynites of all colors, and so despised everywhere else? Why was Brooklyn one of the first urban areas to decay into slums—and one of the first to be reborn? And what was it that made Brooklynites fight for their rights, for their country, for their ideas—sometimes to the detriment of their own well-being? In the Country of Brooklyn, filled with rare photos, is history at its very best—engaging, personal, fascinating—a social history and a history of social justice; an oral history of a land and its people spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; a microcosm of how Americans there faced and defeated discrimination, oppression, and unjust laws, and fought for what was right. And the voices and stories are as amazing as they are varied.

    Meet: Daily Worker sportswriter Lester Rodney • rock and roll DJ "Cousin Brucie" Morrow • labor leader Henry Foner • Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa • journalist and author Pete Hamill • Black Panther–turned-politician Charles Barron • Hall of Fame baseball player Monte Irvin • Spanish Civil War veteran Abe Smorodin • borough president Marty Markowitz • real estate developer Joseph Sitt • jujitsu world champion Robert Crosson • songwriter Neil Sedaka • NYPD officer John Mackie • ACLU president Ira Glasser • and many others!

    It's Brooklyn as we've never seen it before, a place of social activism, political energy, and creative thinking—a place whose vitality has spread around the world for more than 350 years. And a place where you can still get a decent egg cream.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061981715
    Unavailable
    In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World
    Author

    Peter Golenbock

    Peter Golenbock, who also grew up in Stamford, is one of the nation’s best-known sports authors. He has written ten New York Times bestsellers, including The Bronx Zoo (with Sparky Lyle), Number 1 (with Billy Martin), Balls (with Graig Nettles), George: The Poor Little Rich Man Who Built the Yankee Empire, and House of Nails (with Lenny Dykstra). He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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    Reviews for In the Country of Brooklyn

    3/5

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    • 4/5
      This huge (704 pages) book at first glance appears to be yet another nostalgic memoir or compendium of reminiscences of famous people who were born in Brooklyn. But Golenbock is after something much more ambitious and the result is a wonderful book that will interest those with little or no connection to Brooklyn. Virtually every examination of Brooklyn takes as its starting point the diversity evidenced in the fact that one in seven Americans can trace his or her family back to this densely populated 70-square-mile borough that was once a rural suburb of New York City. Golenbock zooms in further, taking as his theme the fight for equality and social justice waged by the myriad ethnic groups, political activists and other victims of discrimination and oppression that have called Brooklyn home. Through dozens of interviews with ordinary – and often extraordinary – people, the book delves into just about every important social movement and upheaval of the 20th century – labor, civil rights, urban decay, white flight, rock and roll, baseball, gentrification and more. The Brooklyn Dodgers figure prominently as a unifying passion for Brooklynites of every stripe and Jackie Robinson appears often as the personification of the fight for human dignity. The book comes alive in the narratives of the people who were there, who tell the stories of teachers who lost their jobs to political witch-hunts, of a baseball idol who responds to a sick child and remembers him many years later, of youngsters who resisted the lure of drugs and gangs and rose to positions in which they could help their communities, of a musically talented kid who made it big, a fireman on 9/11, a real estate developer with a vision, an artist with a lifelong commitment to political activism and many more. I’m one who was there. My neighborhood, my block, my schools, even my summer camp for the children of left-wing parents…they’re all here. I lived a few blocks from Ebbets Field, idolized Jackie Robinson (and still hate the Yankees), was taught not to divulge my family’s political leanings during the McCarthy years, saw the neighborhoods crumble, eventually left and watched in wonder 25 years later as my daughter moved to the very neighborhood we had fled. How could I not love this book?Those who don’t have that emotional connection and who don’t share Golenbock’s biases may see it differently. The connective narrative he supplies is often fascinating, ranging widely over topics like the history of Coney Island, the roots of the Ku Klux Klan, the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, the experiences of African-Americans in the military, the Communist scare of the 1940s and 1950s, and the struggle for community control of schools. But along with the historical record (some of it supported by notes at the end of the book) is a fair amount of editorializing. The author’s point of view is demonstrated also in the choice of interview subjects. There is no attempt to represent the views of those who, say, believed that teachers who harbored left-wing sentiments should be kept out of the classroom. Golenbock didn’t set out to produce a “fair and balanced” history or a collection of nostalgia and I’m grateful that he didn’t. He has made Brooklyn the lens through which we can examine many of the most important social movements of our times and he has shown my home town to have been a hotbed of activism in pursuit of the American ideal. And you thought Brooklyn was all about a bridge, stickball, egg creams and Dem Bums? Fugheddaboudit!
    • 2/5
      The many interviews that make up this book are interesting, but, as other reviewers have pointed out, the organization and linking materials need more work. It's an okay book to dip into (sleepless night? long afternoon?), and will be of special interest to those who are really interested in Brooklyn for one reason or another.
    • 3/5
      In the Country of Brooklyn is Peter Golenbock's compilation of dozens and dozens and dozens and possibly a few more dozen interviews he conducted with various residents of Brooklyn throughout its last almost-century of history. Through the spoken experience of various average and important personages of Brooklyn through the years, Golenbock attempts to give us a sense of an exciting and progressive place, home to the entire spectrum of immigrants that eventually found their way to the United States, that spawned a variety of political activists, sports heroes, as well as an impressive array of cultural contributions. Golenbock uses his interviews to comment on Brooklyn's struggle and ultimate willingness to integrate its diverse population, the struggle to get government to recognize and respond to the needs of its people, its present efforts to rejuvenate parts of the community that have fallen into disuse and disrepair, and, given its length, much, much more.Golenbock must have taken an incredible amount of time to speak with his many subjects and transcribe their words, and it shows. This book is packed with the thoughts and memories of countless people connected in some way to Brooklyn. These interviews make up the meat of the book. Most are interesting, and many are downright compelling. In addition, there are past and present pictures of Booklyn as well as of each of the interviews' subjects which is another definite addition to this book. That said, if you're going to read this book, read it for the interviews. Golenbock's background and assorted "filler" information is at times, unfortunately, downright painful to read. Golenbock's wild generalizations and obvious political intrusions will bother any serious historian and any average person who happens to disagree with his views. The book's organization is also sorely lacking. While the interviews are a pleasure to read, Golenbock seems to struggle to make them coalesce around any sort of main point. Indeed, some of the interviewees, while interesting, seem to have only the most fleeting of connections with Brooklyn which, it seems, Golenbock might have been attempting to include in an effort to define Brooklyn in a certain way that doesn't quite seem to pan out. Instead what we have is a massive tome that, once you've passed the midway point, seems to drag on to some uncertain destination that is never reached. With a good edit for page count and organization and perhaps an overhaul of Golenbock's background information, In the Country of Brooklyn, with all its potent first person accounts, could have packed quite a punch, but as it stands, it will leave real history buffs wishing for something a little more substantial.
    • 1/5
      "The Puritans, similar to the Taliban today, were a joyless lot. ...If a child was a bed wetter, they made him eat a rat sandwich."Right. And if you are thinking it may be unfair to judge the entire book based on this sentence (which is representative, actually, of other such sweeping statements without sources to back them up), then I can only say that I suggest it is unfair to compare all Puritans to the Taliban based on some single Puritan somewhere that fed his child a rat sandwich as a punishment for bedwetting, if it even happened. With no source, we also have no context- perhaps it didn't happen. Perhaps it wasn't a joyless punishment but a strange 17th century folk remedy equally practiced by 17th century Catholics. It's a good example of how difficult it is to take any other stories by this author, however interesting, as accurate.
    • 3/5
      Not being a New Yorker or having actually ever visited, I found this book to be very educational, interesting and enlightening. I do know that several of my relatives passed through Ellis Island about the very time in history the author is writing about . I appreciate the way that brought my personal history alive for me. Recommended for those who really want in depth explanation of the times.
    • 4/5
      Golenbock has written a history of the land and the people. The first chapter tells of the founding of Coney Island by the Dutch in 1609 by Henry Hudson, and the settlement there in the 1640's by Deborah Moody. Some of the people mentioned in the book we don't recognize, but we can recognize what they did. Others are very famous, Jackie Robinson and Neil Sedaka to name two. This is a great history of the ethnic neighborhoods which are now disappearing due to the luxury high rises springing up everywhere. The immigrants mentioned in the book did a lot for the state of New York and the country. The book was about a month late in arriving. Then I took it along on a visit to family to New York (Brooklyn, in fact), thinking I would get some reading done, and left it behind. Finally finished, it was an enjoyable read. I would recommend this especially to those familiar with the Brooklyn neighborhoods, and to those who aren't.
    • 3/5
      This was an interesting study of immigration and the creation of sultures within a culture. Golenbock's portrait of Brooklyn from it's birth in the 17th century through various waves of immigration over the years is filled with diverse stories, from baseball players to amusement park owners, to communists and rabbis. The book itself was an engaging read, but Golenbock's style, casual, at times almost chatty, was difficult to master at first. However, the inclusion of so many first person stories made the experience less like reading a book and more like listening to conversations between people who had been places and seen things completely alien to my own experience.
    • 3/5
      This book tells the story of Brooklyn from the 1920's to today and chronicles the relationship between Brooklyn and the major movements and pastimes of 20th century America. Brooklyn's founding is touched on briefly in the introduction (and what an interesting story that is!), while the rest of the book deals with the waves of immigration that changed the ethnic and racial makeup of the borough. It also covers Brooklyn's effect on and response to the labor movement, the civil rights movement, baseball, drugs, race riots, and gentrification.By far, the strongest parts of In the Country of Brooklyn are the interviews with Brooklyn residents, told in their own words. Happily, these stories make up the majority of the book, with introductions and background provided by Golenbock to clarify the situation for the benefit of the reader. Golenbock's prose is clear and easily readable. He writes with a strong political bias, but since this unapologetic liberal shares his biases, I didn't mind.Residents of Brooklyn will probably love this book. Golenbock is clearly a fan of the borough, and writes with obvious affection. It is also an enjoyable read for outsiders (like me) - the themes touched on in the book affect us all, even if the events and neighborhoods are unfamiliar.