Song of Brooklyn: An Oral History of America’s Preferred Borough
The voices of Brooklyn:
“I’m a Brooklyn guy, it’s in my bones and it is there in Brooklyn. There is a specific rhythm you get developing up there. Each and every Brooklyn kid has it. Often on the correct beat. The Bronx, no Queens, you have been out of it but Brooklyn, that was it.”
—Mel Brooks, Williamsburg
“Everyone got along due to the fact we had a single main issue that held everyone in Brooklyn…together: the emergence of massive-time sports activities that happened soon after World War I. You could be an Irishman, an Italian, and a Jew and you could all be in Ebbets Area, sitting collectively, rooting for the Dodgers.” —Pete Hamill, Park Slope
“I never ever truly saw anyplace in the world as a kid except Brooklyn, so to me Brooklyn was the globe. Every single avenue was yet another nation. It was a rough spot, to be positive. You could say the incorrect point, make the wrong turn and be rubbed or killed, and I guess I was lucky since I had a talent that enabled me to get out . . . A component of me will always be that kid shooting hoops, with a dream in my hand as much as a basketball.”
—Stephon Marbury, Coney Island
“Both my mothers and fathers were hard, hands-on workers, and that was the foundation of almost everything for me. Their operate ethic was just more than the top rated, and as a outcome of that I worked difficult no matter what degree job I had in the media. I was that difficult Brooklyn woman pushing my way to the front, which at some point grew to become the top. I was never ever afraid of hard work I was often a go-getter, and that was a thing that came directly out of becoming born in Brooklyn. I cherish that, as I cherish my total upbringing in Brooklyn.”
—Maria Bartiromo, Bay Ridge
A captivating oral portrait of America’s favored borough, in the words of these who know Brooklyn best—Mel Brooks, Spike Lee, Arthur Miller, Joan Rivers, Norman Mailer, Cousin Brucie, Maria Bartiromo, Pete Hamill, and a lot of other latest and former inhabitants.
Song of Brooklyn gathers the oral testimony of almost a single hundred Brooklynites past and present, renowned and unknown, about a mythic borough that is also an indisputably real place. These witnesses speak eloquently of what it was like back then, when the Dodgers played in Ebbets Area later, when the borough fell on difficult occasions and now, when it has come roaring back on the tracks of a actual-estate boom, providing it celebrity chic and hipster cred. With this surprising and inspiring renaissance in total swing, the story of Brooklyn is 1 of the wonderful and even now ongoing chapters of the American urban experience, and Song of Brooklyn sings that tune in pitch-ideal important.
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