Rating: 
Summary: Author! Author!
Review: Historical fiction at its best...Winegardner's ability to deliver historical fact in the context of a compelling love story, while at the same time exploring the midwest attitudes about race, gender, social class, family, politics and sport in the middle of the last century, seems impossible. But he does so with grace, wit, charm, and amazing depth. Winegardner's tip-of-the-hat to such giants as DiLillo are classy and smart. There's something in this book for everyone.
Rating:
Summary: the way we were (blue collar version)
Review: I grew up in the fifties, about 80 miles outside Cleveland; I had relatives living there. this book, in addition to being an arresting work of fiction, is a wonderfully evocative "history"--subjective and quirky--of that time and place. winegardner writes with a marvelous style, which just (but only just) manages to skirt the edge of slick and over-written. This style works well for the narrative, perhaps a little less well for the dialogue, which at times is too clever by half. But the package as a whole is intelligently conceived, shaped to hold our attention, and a very satisfying read. It's also one of the few contemorary novels whose ending is not too little, not too much, but just right. The author will have a real challenge making his next book measure up to this one. It deserves to stand just behind the best of DeLillo, Doctorow, Russo and Tom Wolfe; it's reminiscent of all of them.
Rating:
Summary: the way we were (blue collar version)
Review: I grew up in the fifties, about 80 miles outside Cleveland; I had relatives living there. this book, in addition to being an arresting work of fiction, is a wonderfully evocative "history"--subjective and quirky--of that time and place. winegardner writes with a marvelous style, which just (but only just) manages to skirt the edge of slick and over-written. This style works well for the narrative, perhaps a little less well for the dialogue, which at times is too clever by half. But the package as a whole is intelligently conceived, shaped to hold our attention, and a very satisfying read. It's also one of the few contemorary novels whose ending is not too little, not too much, but just right. The author will have a real challenge making his next book measure up to this one. It deserves to stand just behind the best of DeLillo, Doctorow, Russo and Tom Wolfe; it's reminiscent of all of them.
Rating:
Summary: a masterpiece
Review: I have a friend who used to run a big independent bookstore here who says this novel is the worst-promoted great novel he's ever seen. Word of mouth on this book was good (my bookseller friend says a lot of independent stores really loved it), and I guess in the end it did do fairly well. But his publisher seemed to think that no one outside of Cleveland would want to read this, which is really weird, espcially when you see how fellow rustbelt books THE CORRECTIONS and MIDDLESEX did. I like both those novels a lot, but CROOKED RIVER BURNING lacks the sophomoric lapses those books fall into from time to time and has a much bigger scope than either one. I think that the best American novels published in this century are those three, Michael Chabon's THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY and Jonathan Lethem's THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. They're all great and they deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. (They're all by writers who are about my age, too, for what that's worth.) Anyway, when Winegardner's sequel to THE GODFATHER comes out, he'll probably finally get his due Somewhere in the hereafter, I bet Mario Puzo is thrilled such a talent agreed to take on the "family" business!
Rating:
Summary: The new Godfather
Review: I have lived in Cleveland for 10 years, and I truly enjoyed this book. Mark managed to actually put me back in time in 1948 when Rock and Roll was just getting started in America. His description of the World Series game that the Indians won that year was exciting, and I don't even like baseball. I loved the love story in the book, and I loved the way it ended. This book is not just a book about Cleveland. It's a book about an era in American history. It's about life in the 50's; the birth of rock and roll; politics of the time; and love, not so different from what you and I experience today. About the river: It's hard to believe that the river was so polluted back then when it's so clean now -- hard to imagine. We really have come a long way. Cleveland rocks!!! I hope Mark's next novel will come out soon. Come and see us in Cleveland!
Rating:
Summary: Loved this book!
Review: I have lived in Cleveland for 10 years, and I truly enjoyed this book. Mark managed to actually put me back in time in 1948 when Rock and Roll was just getting started in America. His description of the World Series game that the Indians won that year was exciting, and I don't even like baseball. I loved the love story in the book, and I loved the way it ended. This book is not just a book about Cleveland. It's a book about an era in American history. It's about life in the 50's; the birth of rock and roll; politics of the time; and love, not so different from what you and I experience today. About the river: It's hard to believe that the river was so polluted back then when it's so clean now -- hard to imagine. We really have come a long way. Cleveland rocks!!! I hope Mark's next novel will come out soon. Come and see us in Cleveland!
Rating:
Summary: Winegardener Gets It Right
Review: I thought this book worked very well. Initially I thought the West Side guy & East Side gal plot would turn out to be a dopey "Romeo and Juliet" take-off, but the author had far better control of his material than that. "Crooked River Burning" isn't a love story but a slice of history that we see through the lives of two people. This book tells how the post-WWII hopes and good feelings of Cleveland gradually darkened and decayed until they crashed and burned with the Glenville riots of 1968. But we see this expressed through the lives of David and Anne, not through some recitation of statistics. In many ways, I think this book does a better job at showing the passage of time than Michael Chabon's "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." To me, the heart of Chabon's book was the 1940-1 material. The chapters on 1945 and 1953, while nice, didn't add anything necessary. "Crooked River Burning," however, moves from the 1940s to the end of the Sixties, and it all holds together. For instance, the baseball game where David sees Satchel Paige pitch in 1948 picks up special resonance in the mid-60s for David and plays a part in the unravelling of his marriage. Very good plotting. As for the footnotes, these were mostly in special chapters on real Cleveland figures, and didn't bother me at all. Chabon had footnotes in "Kavalier and Clay" as well. A good novel about the recent past in a city usually overlooked.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant story - even if you're not from Cleveland.
Review: I was born in Cleveland in the 1976, and though the timeline of the story was before my time spent as a youth in the suburbs of this underrated city, I felt like I could relate almost effortlessly. The fabric that Winegardner weaves is incredibly rich and detailed, with colorful history mingling with exciting fiction. Every city deserves its story told like this, and Cleveland's story was long overdue. What a remarkable learning experience as well!
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent sense of time and place.
Review: It is hard for most people now to remember that Cleveland was not always the nation's most common butt of jokes about urban decay. In "Crooked River Burning" Mark Weingardner evokes a time not that long ago when Cleveland was a trendsetter, when its sports teams were a source of pride and joy, when it had three viable newspapers, when people were so proud of their town they couldn't imagine living anywhere else. David Zielinsky grows up in a cheerful ethnic enclave, living with his aunt and uncle. His dad is a pal of gangsters, his mother ran away to California and died. David is ambitious - he wants to be mayor of Cleveland. It could happen. He has connections to various unions as well as to organized crime (though his dad) and fighters of organized crime (through his uncle.) Anne O'Connor's family is rich, powerful, and as dysfunctional as all get out. She is ambitious, too. She doesn't want to be a deb, she wants to be a war correspondent. For a society girl in the early 1950's, her dream is even more farfetched than David's. Their formative years mirror Cleveland's rise and decline in the 1950's and 60's, and their disillusionment follow the city's own. Weingardner weaves in Cleveland's colorful characters, its history, issues of race, gender, family, ecology and economy, and romance. This is a strong, readable, enlightening book.
Rating:
Summary: Take Cleveland (please!)
Review: Mark Winegardner's epic novel takes Cleveland as not only its setting, but also as an integral character, in Crooked River Burning. Taking place over more than twenty years in the city's history, the characters weave in and out of touch with factual events and legendary figures (Allen Freed, Carl Stokes) in a way that's both self-conscious and proud. In the midst of Cleveland's terrible problems with pollution, race riots, and corruption there is always a sense that the author loves this city right along with its mistakes. The two main characters, Anne and David, come from opposite sides of the city (which, in this case, might as well be opposite sides of the world). David is poor and dreams of a day when he will be mayor of his city and Anne is rich and trying to be a society girl without giving up her career-mindedness. Without giving anything away, it's really refreshing to see how these two keep going in and out of each other's lives without the novel spiralling into hopeless romantic mush. After all, this book isn't about them, not really. It's about Cleveland. Enjoyable and surprisingly informative, I breezed through Crooked River Burning without much to complain about. Winegardner lets his literary tongue wag a little too much as the book goes on, perhaps, and it's not without pretense. The footnotes he uses get in the way and seem lazy...not to mention the most unreadable typeface I've ever seen (in the hardcover edition). However, tackling a subject like this and keeping it enjoyable is quite a task to begin with, and it's pulled off with much style.
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