The Big Crowd, Baker - B+

                                         Kevin Baker writes extraordinary historical novels about New York City that have an amazing ability to place the reader fully in the time and place of the story.  In 'Paradise Alley', he explored the world of the Irish immigrants in the Five Corners during the 1863 draft riots.  He followed up with 'Dreamland' about the Jewish experience on the Lower East Side and in Coney Island at the turn of the 20th century. Those are both wonderful books; but this is the icing on the cake for me.  It's about the Brooklyn and Manhattan docks that my father worked on when he came back from WW2.  The docks were a rough and tumble place of violence, crime, and deceit. This is the story of Charlie and Tom O'Kane, Irish immigrant brothers, the first of whom went from hod carrier, to cop, to lawyer, to Judge, to Brooklyn D.A., and to Mayor. O'Kane is depicted as an almost exact replica of the real life Mayor O'Dwyer. In order to climb that ladder, he had to compromise a bit along the way with the powers that be who ran the city.  Those powers included the Church, represented here by the real-life Francis Cardinal Spellman;  the mob, represented by Frank Costello; the International Longshoreman's Association and it's president-for-life Joe Ryan; the omnipotent Robert Moses; and a host of other historical personages, who feel like they were dreamed up by a novelist. The central event is the defenestration from a Coney Island hotel of Abe Reles, a hit man for Murder, Incorporated.  Abe had turned state's evidence and had helped put dozens behind bars. He was about to squeal on Frankie Anastasia when he flew from a seven story window, surrounded by half a dozen sleeping cops who were guarding 'the Rat's Suite'. The crime was never solved and Baker offers a possible answer in this book.  The author says, "My goal was to depict New York City in all of the gaudy glory of its postwar heyday, and to sift to the bottom of what remain to this day some of its worst and most mysterious public scandals."  He does the job so well that I have noted six or seven of the books he cites in his bibliography and will likely give them a once over. For those of us who wonder about the world that formed us and  who love New York, this is a must read.