Brooklyn The once and future city

While long overshadowed by more famous Manhattan, the borough of Brooklyn, which was a separate city before New York City's consolidation in 1898, has successfully achieved status as a noteworthy destination. Campanella (Cornell Univ.), a Brooklyn native, meticulously measures the borough's trajectory from the 17th to the 21st centuries. He treads new ground by concentrating on past political, social, economic, technological, and even geological developments--and on transitioning neighborhoods and lesser-known personalities--much more than on Brooklyn's better-known tourist attractions. Campanella contemplates the prevailing personality of the Brooklynite, a mixture of ambition, inferiority, and constant reinvention. He concludes with a disquisition on "manufactured authenticity" appropriated by neo-bohemians, who inhabit the borough's northern rocky hills, an area characterized by gentrified Connecticut-quarried brownstones, versus the more robust, ethnically diverse residents of its southern flatlands, anchored by Tudor-style bungalows. Curiously, this is one of the few intellectual works encompassing all of Brooklyn, joining Stephen Ostrander's A History of Brooklyn and Kings County (1894) and Ellen Snyder-Grenier's Brooklyn: An Illustrated History (1996). A scholarly work for urban environmentalists and philosophers of cities, this volume's clearly composed prose will also appeal to regular readers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Frederick J. Augustyn, Library of Congress

A lively biography of New York's second borough, "long lost in the thermonuclear glow of Manhattan" but eminently worthy of attention and affection.One doesn't often think of New York City as a place where geology matters, buried as it is under all that concrete and steel. Yet, as Campanella (Urban Studies and City Planning/Cornell Univ.; The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World, 2008, etc.) observes, it's worth remembering that in Walt Whitman's day, Brooklyn was a place of "ample hills." Even today, the settlement patterns of the borough speak to the glacial past, with the creative class concentrated north of the ancient line of moraines and the till below the "dominion of immigrant strivers and working-class stiffs," sans hip boutiques and coffee shops. There was a time when Coney Island was once an island, a time before Robert Moses carved into the western confines of Long Island a new geology of roadbeds and tall bridges. Campanella delights in overturning received wisdom as he moves from place to place: George Washington made a "strategic error" in trying to defend New York "against Britannia's mighty clenched fist" when, after all, New York was a seaport and Britain the world's chief naval power, and when Brooklyn was loyalistall good reasons, he suggests, for the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn to be one of those things not often mentioned in polite company, to say nothing of textbooks. Those who try to navigate the traffic from Brooklyn to anywhere nearby won't necessarily be cheered to know that people were complaining about "bridge crush" 120 years ago ("Brooklynites needed no trolleys to get to hellthey'd go a faster way"). Of particular interest are Campanella's concluding remarks on the nature of the gentrification now affecting so much of Brooklyn, which involves a stifling lust for authenticity: "Gentification kills the real McCoy," he writes, memorably, "to venerate its taxidermal remains."Teeming with information, this is a must-read for fans of urban history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.