Helpful Score: 2
A well-known author for many years, Doctorow takes the reader to 19th Century New York and he pulls you into the book. It's a moral tale about the sin taking place with these people in that era. I loved it.
Helpful Score: 1
In a city where every form of crime and vice flourishers, corruption is king, fabulous wealth stands on the shoulders of unspeakable want, and there are no limits to larceny...it is New York in 1871.
A great mystery and best I've read of this author for plot and intrigue.
This is a fascinating mystical book. I enjoyed it very much!
Excellent classic!
Fiction, tale of New York City after the civil war.
E. L. Doctorow is one of my favorite authors, but this New York City mystery set in the late 19th century, is cumberson to read because of Doctrow's absolute obcession with language. It is a good book, but reads slowly because of his attention to language in a style which reminds me of Dickens or Edgar Allen Poe. Maybe it is my imagination, but this book seems to have a dark side to it.
The Waterworks , set in the corrupt but hideously exciting New York of the decade following the Civil War, is the strangest such journey yet. The narrator, an elderly newspaperman named McIlvaine, recalls the bizarre events surrounding the disappearance of one of his paper's best freelance writers in 1871. Martin Pemberton was the son of Augustus Pemberton, a brutal, cunning man who had made a fortune as a war profiteer, then died, leaving his family mysteriously penniless. Martin was convinced he had seen his father alive, in a coach in the company of other old men; then Martin vanished. McIlvaine interests the municipal police, in the person of odd, incorruptible Captain Edmund Donne, and together they ferret out a weird scheme in which aging millionaires have paid the brilliant, cold-blooded Dr. Sartorius to preserve their lives in a state of suspended animation.
I didn't read this book.
