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    Strivers Row: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Strivers Row: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Strivers Row: A Novel
    Ebook769 pages14 hours

    Strivers Row: A Novel

    By Kevin Baker

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The Rev. Jonah Dove is the son of a legendary Harlem minister, and a man troubled in both mind and spirit. He feels himself unworthy and incapable of taking up the burden of running his church from the larger–than–life figure who is his father. He is haunted both by his own, shameful history of "passing" as a white man in college, and by the prospects for his people in the harsh, new, racist age he fears the world is entering. Malcolm Little –– better known as Malcom X –– is a teenage hustler from Lansing, Michigan by way of Boston, a young man on the make, trying always to be something bigger, tougher, savvier, and more confident than he really is.

    On his way to New York, Malcolm happens to come to the rescue of Jonah and his wife, Amanda, when they are attacked by some drunken soldiers on the train. From then on, their paths cross repeatedly as they each go about trying to find what they really want out of the roiling, wartime city, until the moment when Harlem finally erupts around them, as a people driven beyond endurance strikes out blindly at all the forces keeping it entrapped in misery and hopelessness. Stranded on the streets of a rioting city, Jonah and Malcolm meet each other once more, as they come to grips with what they are and what the future will hold for them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 19, 2011
    ISBN9780062113641
    Unavailable
    Strivers Row: A Novel
    Author

    Kevin Baker

    Kevin Baker is the bestselling author of the novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Sometimes You See It Coming. He is a columnist for American Heritage magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Harper's, and other periodicals. He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Ellen Abrams, and their cat, Stella.

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    Reviews for Strivers Row

    3.5/5

    22 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It feels like I've been reading this book forever!! I thought it was two weeks, but then I remembered I started another book or two and abandoned them as not worth my time before starting this one. So, maybe it wasn't so bad.Anyway, it was a really fat book. 500+ pages. But it was pretty good. It's fiction, but it's peopled with fascinating historical characters. The main character is Malcolm Little; you probably know him better as Malcolm X. Baker does a great job bringing Harlem in the 1940s to life. There are jazz clubs, zoot suits, conked hair, and torch singers. And racism. I was particularly captivated by the descriptions of the powerful black preachers in the novel. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. has a couple of cameo appearances, but Jonah Dove, a fictionalized version of Powell, was a main character. Through the book, you could see how they cultivated power--political, social, and spiritual.Though I liked the details in the book, I wasn't as impressed with the overall plot. It was telegraphed pretty blatantly from the beginning of the book and required too many implausible connections and "chance" meetings between three of the characters. Still, it wasn't bad.This is an ARC, so they may end up editing it down a bit. It could be tighter by 100 pages or so without losing too much of its power. I may have to check it out when it's released just to see if they cut it some.I guess I'd recommend this one, but not as enthusiastically as some of the other books I've read this year.
    • 3/5
      This is third in a series of books known as the City of Fire, where Kevin Baker delves into the drama of everyday lives among the ordinary, working class communities of historical New York. The books are always richly detailed and well-told. This time the story is set in Harlem in 1943 against the backdrop of World War II and racial tensions ratcheting up. This story is framed around two main characters: the Reverend Jonah Dove who feels unworthy of his leadership role compared with his legendary father and is sometimes able to pass as white, and a fictional version of Malcolm Little who would become Malcolm X. Choosing Malcolm X for a character in a novel is a daring move, especially since Baker takes liberties with the timeline of his discovery of the Nation of Islam. But overall both his characters are rich, flawed, fully-human, and have a feeling of authenticity. The novel is peppered with historical events and the characters reactions to them. Like the previous two novels - Paradise Alley which ended with the Draft Riots and Dreamland which ended with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - Strivers Row culminates in a major event in New York City, this time the Harlem Race Riots of 1943. I think Baker did a better job overall with the previous two books, but this is an entertaining and though-provoking novel