More Than the Dead Know

Authors

  • John Dalziel Author

Keywords:

Brooklyn, urban history, urban planning, gentrification, Barren Island, Thomas J. Campanella

Abstract

John Dalziel reviews Thomas J. Campanella’s Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton UP), a richly detailed and illustrated history of the borough by a scholar of urban planning. Dalziel notes that the book’s focus on zoning and development leaves little room for fuller portraits of its historical figures, and that Campanella reserves his lament over gentrification and lost neighborhoods for the epilogue. He finds the book most engaging in its individuals, dwelling on the history of Barren Island and the teacher Jane Shaw as a concentrated version of the book’s recurring themes, and concludes that its warning against short-sighted, profit-driven urban renewal deserves a wide hearing.

Author Biography

  • John Dalziel

    John Dalziel was born in 1943 into a family environment that lacked opportunity or encouragement for education and spent much of his early years as something of a less than Artful Dodger on the then mean streets of lower Sydney, Australia. Constantly one step ahead of truant officers, he had gravitated to the city libraries, art galleries, and museums as places of refuge, but, most days, would be occupied in the city’s cinemas. Here, his tutors and guides would be discovered to have names such as Kazan, Kramer, Lumet, Wilder and so many others. It was most likely Kazan’s East of Eden that was the initial influence that rescued him from a potential future of alienation and social hostility near to that of a Jack Abbott. The film led to the discovery of Steinbeck at the age of thirteen and consequently to a life-long obsession with reading, particularly of American literature and film history and criticism. For many years, when asked about his family history, he would claim Dostoyevsky as grandfather, Steinbeck for father, and Sartre as uncle. Norman Mailer was the unruly and inspiring older brother.

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Published

2019-10-10

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Book Reviews

How to Cite

Dalziel, John. “More Than the Dead Know”. The Mailer Review, vol. 13, no. 1, Oct. 2019, pp. 225–230, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/700.