Rating: 
Summary: Winegardner/Crooked River Burning
Review: A thoroughly enjoyable modern epic! Fast-paced and evocative narrative woven around two very likeable main characters. The text has a wonderfully theatrical quality to it as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Ouch!!
Review: As mentioned before, the author tries a little too hard to be brilliant, cutting-edge, trendy, a "risk taker," etc., by using footnotes, parentheses,etc. No one wants to read footnotes in a novel, especially when some of them take up almost half of the page of already fine print text. Half of this novel could be cut out. So much of it was dull filler! What was the point of that chapter on Dorothy Fuldheim? That was brutal. Could have been better. What a great title though!
Rating:
Summary: Don't have to be from Cleveland to Appreciate it
Review: Aside from an airport connection in Cincinnati, I have never set foot in Ohio so I can confidently state that one need not hail from Cleveland, or be a Drew Carey fan, to appreciate this ambitious novel. I couldn't wait to get back to it every night, and thought Winegardner's ambitious tale brought the city to life in my eyes.The novel tells the story of Anne O'Connor and David Zielinsky, a mismatched couple from divurgent backgrounds who drift in and out of each other's lives over a long span of years. She is wealthy, daughter of a high-ranking politian, and a polished debuttante bored with the snobby rich boys she is expected to date. David, on the other hand, is politically ambitious, awkward, and the son of a colorful hard-drinking union man whose mother took off years earlier to Hollywood where she went chasing a movie career. The scenes in which David and Anne meet and get together at a vacation island in the lake, where David is visiting with his Aunt and Uncle, are wonderful and memorable. The story of David and Anne is compelling, but not what I really remember and enjoyed most about this novel. Instead, I remember details of the Sam Shephard murder case (David's uncle is an investigator hired by the defense team, and David works on the case for awhile). I also remember lengthy cameos by Alan Freed and his first rock n roll shows; the effort by the Cleveland Indians to integrate baseball (their African American player, Larry Doby, entered the league just after Jackie Robinson, the Dodgers' celebrated player who broke the color barrier);cameos by newscaster Dorothy Fuldheim and black mayor Carl Stokes, etc. I loved the description of Art Modell buying the Cleveland Browns, pushing Paul Brown out to pasture, and essentially guaranteeing a title in a "win now or else" mode a la George Steinbrenner and the Yankees years later. David is a huge music and sports fan, gets his feet wet in politics, and since Anne becomes a newswoman all of these historical figures and events are woven effortlessly into the plot. The only thing I disliked about the book, and it DID get annoying, was the frequest bizarre second person asides which the author inserted. In a chapter about a newscaster, for example, Winegardner would add footnotes indicating what the future holds in store for the character, as if the novelist were reading to the real-life Fuldheim and telling her what awards she would win, and when she would retire. I don't remember ever seeing anything like it in any other novels. Otherwise, I thought there was little to quibble about, and a lot to enjoy, in this grand novel. Winegardner's generosity of spirit, his ability to manage a large canvas, and his sharp dialogue will serve him well as he writes a sequel to Mario Puzo's The Godfather.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficial, gimmicky read
Review: Beautiful cover on this book. What's inside though, well plodding stories with quote mildly shocking stories about generally sex, sex, and more badly written sex -- not shocking sex but dull affairs, or paintings of male genitals. It started out dull and remained that way, mainly because the characters are wooden, undefined, pasteboard, flat. There is no insight into the human soul. The stories are bland, choppy, plots dwindle and seem contrived. I suspect the author is a decent teacher, telling his students to look for details because he (the author) does this. Yet details don't make character. One thing I hate in books is to see similar descriptions about different people in the book, I question the authors imagination and word usage. I had to force myself to read the last three stories. In a nod to carver he has characters mention same places as thought there were a subtle entwining of their lives behind the scenes. Even this doesn't work. In fact very little works in these stories. Move on and read Carver or O'Connor, or Bellow, or Updike.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous...
Review: Before there was Drew Carey, the Baltimore Ravens or the "Major League" franchise, there was a big, boisterous, proud city that was neither Northeast nor Midwest. This book ends where my recollection of Cleveland begins -- the fire on the Cuyahoga River -- and in my mind for years, it was all downhill from there. I saw Cleveland as the largest of this country's many burned-out, boarded-up, hunkered-down mill towns, covered with road salt and coke ash, an industrial mistake glaring my state in the face and daring us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Mr. Weingardner showed me the vibrance, the beauty, the exuberance of a Cleveland in her prime through the lives of his two ironically fashioned and perfectly representative main characters. He chronicles Cleveland's transition from a city where anything seemed possible to a city where nothing much seemed probable anymore, with pit stops on the way for delicious and delectable memories of people and places which were gone before I was even born. This book made me feel as though Cleveland's story -- and David and Anne's story -- was also mine, and everyone else's. It shys away from the homefront forties, the Leave it to Beaver fifties, and the Woodstock and Berkeley sixties to show us how middle America actually lived for twenty-five years, from upper-middle class to lower-middle class and points between and beyond. This book is for all of us because it immortalizes a time an place far-too-often overlooked and ridiculed.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous...
Review: Before there was Drew Carey, the Baltimore Ravens or the "Major League" franchise, there was a big, boisterous, proud city that was neither Northeast nor Midwest. This book ends where my recollection of Cleveland begins -- the fire on the Cuyahoga River -- and in my mind for years, it was all downhill from there. I saw Cleveland as the largest of this country's many burned-out, boarded-up, hunkered-down mill towns, covered with road salt and coke ash, an industrial mistake glaring my state in the face and daring us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Mr. Weingardner showed me the vibrance, the beauty, the exuberance of a Cleveland in her prime through the lives of his two ironically fashioned and perfectly representative main characters. He chronicles Cleveland's transition from a city where anything seemed possible to a city where nothing much seemed probable anymore, with pit stops on the way for delicious and delectable memories of people and places which were gone before I was even born. This book made me feel as though Cleveland's story -- and David and Anne's story -- was also mine, and everyone else's. It shys away from the homefront forties, the Leave it to Beaver fifties, and the Woodstock and Berkeley sixties to show us how middle America actually lived for twenty-five years, from upper-middle class to lower-middle class and points between and beyond. This book is for all of us because it immortalizes a time an place far-too-often overlooked and ridiculed.
Rating: 
Summary: HORRIBLE DISSAPPOINTMENT
Review: Crooked River Burning is an astonishing disappointment. The narrative drags amid endless footnotes and self-conscious attempts at brilliance that miserably fail. The author's affection for Cleveland rings loud and clear but so much so that it borders on parody. There is very little to recommend here.
Rating:
Summary: The great read for the season
Review: Don't let the description of the basic plot of this novel make you think in any way that it is derivative or ho-hum...the basic "boy from the wrong side of town" plot. It may seem to start there, but it is so much more by even just the first 25 pages. This novel does what I look for in a book: tells a unique story, creating a time and place, with characters which live. To this extent The Albany Trilogy by Wm Kennedy comes closest to a reference on the literary map. The historical setting of the start of the second half of the 20th century, Cleveland (of all places, but it works!) gives a window to America, baseball, emerging women's and race issues, social classes, politics, life lived then in full color rather than black and white. The real and true strength of the book though is in the mastery of language, playful and otherwise, astonishing, the explicit presence and voice of an author that is not intrusive to the story, but woven into the telling. Just as Lethem and Auster have their own unique voices and styles, so too does Winegardner. There are other novel coming out right now. I personally am looking forward to new Delillo, and another from Norton titled Death of Vishnu, Peter Carey's newest. None of them can be stronger than this one though.
Rating:
Summary: The great read for the season
Review: Don't let the description of the basic plot of this novel make you think in any way that it is derivative or ho-hum...the basic "boy from the wrong side of town" plot. It may seem to start there, but it is so much more by even just the first 25 pages. This novel does what I look for in a book: tells a unique story, creating a time and place, with characters which live. To this extent The Albany Trilogy by Wm Kennedy comes closest to a reference on the literary map. The historical setting of the start of the second half of the 20th century, Cleveland (of all places, but it works!) gives a window to America, baseball, emerging women's and race issues, social classes, politics, life lived then in full color rather than black and white. The real and true strength of the book though is in the mastery of language, playful and otherwise, astonishing, the explicit presence and voice of an author that is not intrusive to the story, but woven into the telling. Just as Lethem and Auster have their own unique voices and styles, so too does Winegardner. There are other novel coming out right now. I personally am looking forward to new Delillo, and another from Norton titled Death of Vishnu, Peter Carey's newest. None of them can be stronger than this one though.
Rating:
Summary: HUGELY AMBITIOUS & HUGELY TALENTED!
Review: Here's that rare animal -- a hugely ambitious novel in which the ambitions of the author are hugely realized! Winegardner has got it down bigtime! His depiction of Cleveland (I speak as a long-alienated native) is as good as it gets and his blend of real people and fictional protagonists really works. He made me care deeply about his two leads characters, drew them so well I felt I knew them. I cannot fault his writing, his concept, his delivery in any way. I only wish this book were better packaged in terms of cover art, to attract the readers it so richly deserves. If you think Cleveland is a bore or a joke, when you finish CROOKED RIVER BURNING you'll find you have a new vision. Bravo for the author! My highest recommendation!
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