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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.
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.
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