Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful book; perfect for expat Clevelanders
Review: My own time growing up in Cleveland corresponds with the latter portion of the book. Winegardner captures the tone of the time perfectly and the rest of the book has wonderful set pieces, as well. The seques into Dorothy Fuldheim and other subjects are well worth the effort, but may be more useful for Clevelanders than for "foreigners" and sometimes he simply tries too hard with these sections. There also are some minor inaccuracies. A better story would have come from an east sider perspective (just kidding, my roots are in Willowick & Cleveland Hts), but someone else can write that one. Still, the book was evocative and it's depth in Cleveland lore reminded me why I still feel affection for Cleveland.
Rating: 
Summary: Editor! Anybody see an editor around here?!
Review: Okay. I admit it. When I started reading Crooked River Burning, I thought it was right on par with Underworld. It was that good. And mostly, it is a very good book. I recommended it to my 75 year old mother who loved it--read it almost in one sitting. But, I found myself going from savoring it, reading it a bit at a time, to finally, when I got up to page 500, plodding through it, wishing it was over. And I can't say I was thrilled with the ending. All that, 561 pages and I was left with an empty feeling.I think the book is better understood and appreciated if you live or have lived in Cleveland. I'm not sure living through the agony of Cleveland sports is something that can be expanded to include the rest of the country--you kind of had to be there--ditto with the Cleveland newspaper industry and the TV personalities--although some of the material was fascinating and I'm sure very well researched, again, I'm not sure a person from Birmingham or Ft. Worth would give a hoot about much of it. The love story that binds the book frustrates more than anything. . . It's a large investment in time, but I could in no way say it was a bad book. I'd highly recommend it to anybody that is from Cleveland and now lives elsewhere. I bought it for my 78 year old dad and I'm sure he'll enjoy it--because he lived through the times and will recognize the names. Cleveland has a rich history and Mark has done a fine job of bringing it to light. But, when I finished the book, I wondered a bit what might have been.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Novel
Review: One of the best books you're likely to read this year. Winegardner weaves an intricate tale that is intensely personal and yet speaks to larger themes. While the book is wildly ambitious, it never loses sight of its characters and story. We need more novels like this one.
Rating:
Summary: The new Godfather
Review: Random House couldn't possibly have picked a better, more talented and spot-on choice to write the sequel to THE GODFATHER. This is a brilliant book and, like millions of people, I'm eager to see what he'll do with the Corleones. I'll certainly be the first in line to buy that book. If it's even half as good as this, it'll blow Puzo to smithereens.
Rating:
Summary: Burning Like an Eternal Flame
Review: The Crooked River burns and burns in the souls of native Clevelanders, especially those like my brother and me, who were born (1946 and 1951) at just the time when the glories of Cleveland began to fade with Willie Mays spearing Vic Wertz's drive in 1954 to make the record-setting 111-win season ironic in a way that would mark the city ever since. The Crooked River also divides, and Winegardner portrays geographical divisions corresponding to notions and realities of class and wealth and politics and race and ethnicity with the frank insights of Mike Royko. I agree with the reviewer who likened *Crooked River* to William Kennedy's Albany trilogy. It also gives those who have not been there a taste of everyman urban lives lived, Cleveland-style, of which one can get a fuller autobiographical dose in Michael DeCapite's *Through the Windshield.* But as in Dreiser's *American Tragedy*, we also get here a view of the rich (lacking in deCapite's taxi-driver view of Cleveland's decaying near west side in the 1980's), and here the lives of the powerful and wealthy are seen to be no less chaotic, shapeless, pointless, grubbing and, in their own ways, desperate. And, like DeCapite, Windegardner uses authorial irony just enough still to be respectful of the lives that he tries to help us comprehend. What WAS Sam Sheppard thinking as he wrestled the last years of his life away in scenes that could be spliced Zelig-style into "Requiem for a Heavyweight"? The novel made me smell the sulphur gas of Republic Steel and Jones and Laughlin, see the street-corner ethnic neighborhood bar signs (the Bide-A-Wee, the Dew-Drop-Inn, Krizak's and Monar's) of the West and East 30's to low 100's, remember what it was like to be one of 7,000 fans in a 77,000-seat WPA stadium rooting for Sudden Sam McDowell to strike out an equally drunken Mickey Mantle (in his last years), recall the little talk I heard in our Lithuanian-Polish working-class household about Bert Porter and his cronies and Democratic politics that my mom worked at low levels to try to advance my dad in the Post Office (he was restricted by the Hatch Act from politicking in his own behalf), and hear the R&B from WJMO (Tiger Radio) and WABQ (Soul-ar Power)--maybe vice versa--as it played in Phil Borchert's car on the drive down West 25th to St. Ignatius Jesuit High School in 1968-69. *Crooked River* also made me remember listening to the Zenith transistor radio on fall Sundays and keeping track on a notepad of Jim Brown's yardage run by run, and how it felt to be shivering in November, 1963 on Robbie Mangol's front steps waiting for his father, by then divorced from his mother, to go to my first NFL game. Right then Mrs. Mangol came out and said to us Browns-fixated twelve-year-olds "Someone just shot Lee Harvey Oswald." We kids got to go because other adults stayed home to watch the assassination aftermath, while big-time sports showed its first patent symptoms of greed with a capital G, by not cancelling games for a murdered president. (This foreshadows Art Modell's carpet-bagging to Baltimore, which Winegardner rightly calls "Cleveland of the East"). The discussion of Cleveland's racial politics made me remember the vehemence with which the Polish community of Parma fought against any black families moving in. They also fought against portrayal of themselves as white-socks-wearing muck rakers on Lake Erie. For that hail Ernie Anderson, father of Tim (Boogie Nights director), and the most famous and culture-shaping character from this period that Winegardner left out. He was creative late-Friday-night horror-film host-schtickster Ghoulardi, founder of the dynasty of Big Chuck and Houlihan, Little John, and eventually Mystery Science Theater. Hail Mark Winegardner for making the eternal flame burn a little brighter in the hearts of those who have lived the Cleveland life and making outsiders aware that it is even there.
Rating:
Summary: Terrific Read
Review: This is a love story written about a city. Cleveland has been much maligned for many years, but Mark Winegardner has written a story to make Clevelanders proud. For those readers with no interest in the city or its history, this is a rollicking good story full of larger than life characters inter-twined with historical figures. Mark Winegardner's writing style pulls you in and the story is so compelling that I didn't want it to end.
Rating:
Summary: Nostalgic, proud, just like the city....
Review: This is a lovely (and loving) tribute to a city that has been much aligned in print over the past few years. The narrator, omniscient, yet not unbenevolent, dignified, with just enough cynicism to be believable, was a wonderful creation. As someone who now lives in Cleveland but only for the past two years, I cannot emphasize enough that this book is approachable by any reader. Like the city itself, the voices are neither midwestern, nor eastern, but just their own selves. A wonderful contribution to the ever expanding literature coming out of the rust belt!
Rating:
Summary: Deep Saga Telling
Review: This is a novel that challenges and rewards in equal measure, a saga of Cleveland, a panoply of engaging characters who grapple with the twists of fate in the city and its defining crooked river, The Cuyahoga. How Winegardner weaves his story is impressive, bringing together mobsters and politicians and journalists, and how he makes us care about their fate and Cleveland's in their wake is the magic of grand storytelling. Any attempt at a faithful summary would require more space than I think is justified in giving my opinion here. Others have done well enough.
Winegardner has a great ear for speech. His dialogue is spot-on. He also has a fine sense of what drives people's deepest ambitions. His characters are large and complex. And he obviously loves baseball, America's first sport of choice (which has yielded to football).
I'm currently in the early stages of reading THE VERACRUZ BLUES, his "baseball novel" that's far more than that, akin to Malamud's THE NATURAL in literary strength. He's hooked me again.
Now I understand Winegardner's selection to pen the sequel to Puzo's THE GODFATHER. He will write a worthy book, most likely far better than the original. I can't wait. I've never read Puzo's book, but I will as preparation, call it a warm-up, for the sequel.
This writer is good and here to stay.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, funny, touching
Review: This is the latest in a series of wonderful books by the talented author, Mark Winegardner. Mr. Winegardner, with a deft touch for dialogue, captures a sweeping hisotry of the decline of a classic midwestern city. He brings the famous back to life and gives us a glimpse of a number of different Clevelands. Though this is about Cleveland, it could really be the story of any of our great midwestern cities in the past 60 years. Mr. Winegardner makes us care about his story through his wonderful use of the language. He weaves a tapestry that one cannot help but embrace. This is a fine piece of fiction, and one worth owning and reading.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, funny, touching
Review: This is the latest in a series of wonderful books by the talented author, Mark Winegardner. Mr. Winegardner, with a deft touch for dialogue, captures a sweeping hisotry of the decline of a classic midwestern city. He brings the famous back to life and gives us a glimpse of a number of different Clevelands. Though this is about Cleveland, it could really be the story of any of our great midwestern cities in the past 60 years. Mr. Winegardner makes us care about his story through his wonderful use of the language. He weaves a tapestry that one cannot help but embrace. This is a fine piece of fiction, and one worth owning and reading.
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