Synopses & Reviews
Summer, 1943. Harlem is a never-ending carnival. Soldiers and sailors, hustlers and glamour girls fill its streets, looking for excitement. Every night, dance halls like the Savoy Ballroom are filled with frenzied jitterbuggers, and the best jazz musicians in the world face off in rent parties and clubs such as Small's Paradise.
Yet underneath the glitter, Harlem's black residents remain second-class citizens, shut out of most jobs, charged double the rents of white New Yorkers, and alternately ignored and harassed by the police. In military training camps throughout the South, their enlisted sons are beaten, jailed, even murdered. Harlem is a tinderbox, waiting for a match.
Along these restless streets, two very different young men cross paths. Their chance encounter will change both their lives and presages the coming battle for civil rights. Malcolm Little is a street hustler, a numbers runner and pot dealer; a naive, cocky, troubled teenager fresh off the train, dazzled by everything around him and not yet the iconic civil rights leader, Malcolm X, that he will become. The Reverend Jonah Dove is the minister of one of Harlem's greatest churches and a resident of Strivers Row, one of the community's most elite neighborhoods.
Their lives intersect when Malcolm rescues Jonah and his wife from a group of drunken white soldiers. For Jonah, it is a crowning indignity that brings on a crisis of faith. Though still ashamed of his attempt to "pass" as white during college, he has begun to do so again, on secret trips away from Harlem.
Malcolm is haunted by his own past, in a family riven by extreme poverty, mental illness, and racial prejudice. He plunges ecstatically into the nightlife of Harlem. It is the life Malcolm has long envisioned for himself yet he finds it hollow at the core. Lonely and confused, he starts to have odd dreams and visions of a mysterious black prophet who calls himself Elijah, the beginning of a religious conversion that will overthrow his whole world.
As race riots break out across the homefront, and Harlem slides toward the brink, Jonah and Malcolm must confront their own demons. Their next meeting, in the midst of turmoil, will lead them both to make fateful choices, for themselves and for their community.
Strivers Row completes the "City of Fire" trilogy begun with Dreamland and Paradise Alley. Master storyteller Kevin Baker has once again woven an epic tale set against the panoramic backdrop of a vanished New York. Here is a world of dream books and lindyhoppers, jazz greats and secret cults the forgotten black history of New York City, restored to passionate life on every page.
Review
"With considerable historical knowledge and narrative fluidity, Baker renders their conflicts and choices as paradigmatic of the situations in which blacks found themselves during that era before the civil rights movement began in full." Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Nobody makes historical fiction burn like Kevin Baker. After working as the chief researcher for Harry Evans's The American Century, Baker stepped out of the wings and published his first novel, Dreamland, a spectacular, sprawling tale about the violent underbelly of New York in 1910. He followed that three years later with Paradise Alley, an even more incendiary story about the destruction of Manhattan during a Civil War draft riot in 1863. And now he's completed what he calls his "City of Fire" trilogy with Strivers Row, a novel about Harlem during World War II." Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World
Review
"An ambitious, cinematic tale
Kevin Baker is a rare talent." Boston Globe
Review
"Kevin Baker, the lit worlds sharpest chronicler of New Yorks past, scores again." Rolling Stone
Review
" Masterful... succeeds on every level... Bakers kaleidoscopic evocation of Harlem... bursts from every page." BookPage
Review
"Ambitious, at times transcendent... brings to vibrant life a notable chapter in New York City history." Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Daring... [Baker is] the best writer of historical fiction currently practicing." Los Angeles Times
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
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.