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(More customer reviews)I am a Jersey kid by birth. I graduated high school the same year as Bruce Springsteen, but about 50 miles away. It might as well have been 5 million miles.
As a kid, there were family trips to the boardwalk at Asbury Park. When I was in high school, there were concerts at Convention Hall. I even dated a girl who's family spent part of the summer in Ocean Grove, but that's a story for another time. To me, Asbury Park was the length and breadth of the beach and boardwalk.
It was obvious, even to an infrequent visitor like me, that the city was in terrible decline, but it took this book to explain how and why that happened, and, at the same time, place that experience within a much larger context.
The stresses caused by the fundamental dichotomies that Asbury Park was built on are the same ones that challenge much of the U.S. Religion and commerce, racial conflict, the strengths and weaknesses of machine politics, even the tug-of-war of fantasy and reality, they are all in Asbury Park's history, and they are all around us, wherever we are. Those conflicts all took a terrible toll on Asbury Park, just as they all take a toll everywhere.
In this book, Daniel Wolff tells us the history of a small place, and in the telling, illuminates larger truths. It is no coincidence that Springsteen's fame grew as he found ways to express his universal themes without tying them to a specific place and time. In his own way, Daniel Wolfe lets us see how and why that happened.
As serious as the subject matter is, the book is written in a deftly lighthanded style that makes reading it a completely enjoyable event. Don't miss it.
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