Broadcast September 22,2013 Read More

Kevin Baker is one of the best novelists around today who can take dry facts from history textbooks and turn them into highly-readable, entertaining fiction. Read More

The members of the “big crowd” referred to in the title of Kevin Baker’s rewarding new novel are, more or less, the bad guys of the story: the pols, mobsters, union goons and grasping business types who fend off reformers and joust for control of New York in the middle of the 20th century. Read More

“The Big Crowd is nothing short of a modern masterpiece. Kevin Baker brings the docks of New York and all their intrigue back to life in vivid detail, combining the historical and the human into a deeply affecting story that connects the past to the present in a way that many novels attempt but few manage.” —Steven Galloway, author of The Cellist of Sarajevo   “With The Big Crowd, Kevin Baker earns the title of Best American Historical Novelist –heck, maybe best American novelist, period. This inspired, fun, serious, thought-provoking, page-turning book gives all the good, old pleasures: if you Read More