O Albany!
Part essay, part memoir, this urban portrait traces Albany’s history, politics, and memory. By folding local figures and changing streets into one narrative, it moves fluidly between personal history and public history.
Work Information
A portrait of a city becomes a map of the writer’s own memory.
William Kennedy’s nonfiction portrait of Albany moves between journalistic observation and literary remembrance, giving the city a vivid human scale.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Viking Adult
- Published
- 1983-12-15
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 50.8 x 50.8 x 50.8 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780670520879
- ISBN-10
- 067052087X
- Price
- 44741 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/History/Americas
An historical profile of the capital of New York documents the neighborhoods, ethicity, culture, society, and colorful people of Albany
Reviews
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Like all of Bill Kennedy's book, this was a great read. I love reading about the era of machine politics and great American politicians and leaders. This book is a wonderful story of one of the longest lived and most endearing machine politics systems - Albany's O'Connell Machine. I heard tales from my uncle of days when the Democratic party, in which my grandfather was a ward leader (in Troy NY) and later a public works commissioner, really took care of their people - in exchange for a binding guarantee for their votes, of course. I am very proud of the very human and kind acts done for the people of the ward. The political machine of Grandpa's day had great power, and it used it for the benefit of the people.
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...Kennedy's love for the capitol of New York is more heartfelt in all of his great fiction than in this somewhat turgid history. When you stack it next to such books as IRONWEED, VERY OLD BONES and THE FLAMING CORSAGE, O ALBANY reads rather dry by comparison, something Kennedy at his best seldom is.
Related Literary Awards
- American Book Awards Edition 5 (1984) ・Winner