Thirty-odd summers ago, Columbia University student Kevin Baker went home to Rockport, Mass., to cover high-school sports for the local paper, where I was a fledgling editor.
He was a teenager then — a sweet, shy guy who’d fallen in love with NYC and was hell-bent on writing novels. Since the he has, lots of them — nearly all inspired by NYC history, including his best-selling “City of Fire” trilogy.
His newest, “The Big Crowd,” based on the organized-crime hearings of the 1950s, drew a big thumbs-up from reviewer Scott Turow.
“People ask why I write historical fiction,” Baker says. “It’s because there’s so much to draw on. It’s like that old show, about ‘8 million stories in the Naked City.'”
Here are four favorite books about the city he adores.
World’s Fair
by E.L. Doctorow
Doctorow is the progenitor and master of the modern historical novel. I think “World’s Fair” is his best: a look at New York on the verge of WWII, by turns charming and poignant and very ominous. There’s a great juxtaposition between the looming war and hopes for the future embodied in the fair, a well as the fateful passage of the Hindenburg zeppelin, the symbol of German might, over the city, on its way to crash and burn.
Banished Children of Eve
by Peter Quinn
A terrific novel of the city’s greatest trauma, the Civil War draft riots of 1863. Peter Quinn is another lifelong writer who knows the city like no one else — and has a sly sense of humor to boot. It’s a terrible time but a great book.
The Power Broker
by Robert Caro
The epic story of Robert Moses and his time, probably the best book ever written about American politics — and an invaluable blueprint for what NOT to do in planning a metropolis. The book is subtitled “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” but it didn’t happen, no doubt in part because of Caro’s work. And cities can be so resilient!
A Drinking Life
by Pete Hamill
A wonderful memoir by the man who should be anointed Chief Mensch of New York. Hamill’s work was a terrific resource for me in writing about both New York and Mexico in the postwar era. It’s a great record of a young man’s coming of age, about alcohol and what it can do — and everything else in life.