Product Description

A likable Irish-American hustler, a Yankee stockbroker, a beautiful mulatto musical comedy star, and her white minstrel lover experience life in New York City during the Civil War Draft Riots. TV tie-in. 50,000 first printing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1499928 in Books
• Published on: 1994-03-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This remarkably accomplished and ambitious first novel, by the chief speechwriter at Time Warner, is a historical saga set in a New York that is as vividly realized for its period (the Civil War) as Bonfire of the Vanities was for the 1980s. It also has much the same narrative drive and broad range of characters, and is as grandly cynical about most human activities. It follows a motley group of New Yorkers through a few days in the terrible summer of 1863, when anguish at the dragging war, the boiling rancor between the invading Irish immigrants and "True Americans," the hatred of both for the blacks they feared would take away their jobs, the festering resentment of the poor against the new rich, and the all-embracing new draft laws combined to set the city ablaze. The Draft Riots form an unforgettable climax, but the book never lags for a moment on its grinding progress toward apocalypse. We see an Irish con man at his work; a young actor who is an early minstrel star (audiences laugh at minstrels and weep at Uncle Tom's Cabin even as their behavior to the black people among them is appalling); a beautiful young mulatto woman making her delicate, dangerous way through life; a child runaway who becomes a successful broker, only to face losing his fortune if he bets wrong on which side will be victorious in the war; and poor Stephen Foster, his songs on everyone's lips but reduced to plundering what little is left of his talent to pay for the oblivion of drink. It is a vast, compelling panoply of human misery and greed, with a keen sense of how New York looked, felt and smelled 130 years ago. Quinn's is the best kind of historical novel, providing both the compelling detail and the broad understanding that makes a past age both believable and comprehensible. 50,000 first printing; $40,000 ad/promo; BOMC selection.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Set in New York City during the Civil War years, this first novel echoes with Stephen Foster songs and the disparate voices of its teeming throngs of citizens while focusing on the experience of Irish Catholic immigrants. Quinn offers a strong, imaginative, and well-researched examination of the life of common people in that time through portraits of hucksters, minstrel actors, speculators, soldiers, and domestic servants whose lives touch. Their stories, set against a background of emigration, war, gangs, racism, stock exchange crashes, shanty towns, draft resistance, prostitution, strikes, and the manipulation of the uneducated masses to embrace a national interest, suggest that characterization of any past as "the good old days" is always a matter of who's doing the talking. Thoroughly enjoyable, educational, and highly recommended for fiction collections.
- Sheila Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Certainly Quinn's setting, the New York draft riots of 1863, is surrounded with compelling subjects--racial tensions, animosity between immigrants and nationals, urbanization, and the Civil War. Any one of those could sustain a novel, but the difficulty with this valiant debut effort is that Quinn goes after everything and never really focuses his narrative. He relates the life of a dozen or so citizens, mixing in flashbacks, taking the reader to the point when violence flashes and Irish mobs start lynching blacks. Yet Quinn also distracts the reader by creating one character after another without convincingly linking them. The result is a series of vignettes, including those of a clever criminal (the best drawn one), a stockbroker, an Irish domestic, minstrels in blackface, musician Stephen Foster down on his luck, etc. Quinn seemingly is attempting a period Bonfire of the Vanities, but his principal success is in his presentation of a wealth of contemporary detail (an information hoard useful in Quinn's day job, as a speechwriter for governors and Time Warner). Readers drawn more to history than character and story may warm to Banished Children. Gilbert Taylor

Customer Reviews

A difficult tragedy of forgetting in New York's palimpsest
I grew up in New York and walked many of the same streets Peter Quinn writes about in Banished Children of Eve. They're still there. If you look down at the pavement in some of the older neighborhoods, the same slate and stone sidewalks might still be in place that were there in 1863. Even if the remnants of that old city were plowed under by the wrecking ball, even before the terrorist came with his commandeered passenger jets, other remnants remained. And Gettysburg is not the only place where one feels the presence of ghosts.

Quinn's novel is imperfect. It's overly long and one could almost say the writing is florid, the style at points too meandering. But we are modernists or postmodernists, we are in a damned hurry and we want our plots laid out before us rapid-fire. Quinn slows us down. He draws us into the nexus of an old city beneath the city we know, a place of ugliness that makes even the ugliness of today's New York seem bucolic: today's racism and poverty are as nothing compared to what we find in Civil War New York.

Here people are still able to reinvent themselves and shapeshift. The daughter of a former stockbroker ruined in the 1857 Panic reinvents herself as the Trumpeter Swan, ultra-whore of a concert saloon and chief attraction of a peepshow for masturbating Union officers. A financier comes from nowhere, builds his fortune on a lie born of pre-computer identity-theft, brutally kills (of course in New Jersey!) to preserve his money, disappears, resurfaces as someone else and proves you can get away with murder. A safecracker becomes a hero in spite of himself and becomes the grandfather of a Jesuit Rector of Fordham University. A half-black woman masquerades as a Cuban actress.

Through it all runs the sense of tragedy, of a city burying its own past. Midian Wells disappears from Staten Island to Troy, graveyards are overturned for new building sites, the grave of a department store magnate is robbed for his grave desecrations, and ultimately the characters with whom we identify by novel's end are forgotten two generations later, plowed under by the present as Potter's Field is covered over by layers of new dead. What survives? Ironically, the monument of a decrepit Archbishop--St. Patrick's Cathedral--and the songs of a hopeless alcoholic, Stephen Foster, whose periodic appearances in the novel are perhaps its most gratuitous as well as ghastly element, a sense of living death hauled into view when real death, the slaughter of innocent and guilty alike, looms through the Draft Riots of July 1863, hanging over the novel like the diseases that swept through New York with the irregularity of sawteeth, and just as viciously.

The book is a hard read for people who want it easy. It's not linear, it's not always fun, and it's calculated at moments to make you turn your head away. I dread the idea that someone might wish to make a movie of Banished Children of Eve and "straighten it out." Its disconnectedness is its flaw and virtue together: you need to work at it, and the rewards outweigh the demands.

A NOVEL OF THE NEW SOCIAL HISTORY
For generations historians studied the lives of elite white men in order to compile a record of the past. Starting in the 1950's, historians began using the "bottoms up" approach to history wherein they looked at the lives of individual persons at the lower end of the tradional social order. Traditionally historians considered the center of the society - kings, leaders, rulers - as the controlling force. More recent historians argue that the periphery, that is the persons of what was usually called the fringes of the society, controls the center.

Peter Quinn ably uses this approach in his novel BANISHED CHILDREN OF EVE. In considering life in mid 19th century New York City, he explains the prejudice that existed between the Irish and the Black community on an economic level which makes it understandable. While not justifying the acts of violence, the reader comes to see the blight of the underclass. The reader comes to identify with the overworked housemaid, petty criminal, homeless orphan and free black. One sees the corruption in the society. The upper clas is not romanticized but shown as the oppressors.

The Civil War affected major changes in the lives of most Americans. Quinn shows the changes in the lives of the major characters in the book. Through the eyes of these characters the reader sees the emergence of the middle class, which was one of the major impacts of the War. There are Horatio Alger stories in the book but not in the tradtional sense. The reader also sees the brutality of life in 19th Century society. Death and separation from parents and realtives were a common experience. The use of alcohol was common and one can see why the Temperance Movement became so important by the end of the century. And prostitution is shown as the only way out for many women. But some women do get out of it.

Students read about the brutality of slavery and as a African American and a student of African American history I am in no way trying to diminish the horrors of America's "peculiar institution." Slaves lacked all rights and had no freecom to lave their masters. Family members were sold and never seen again. But when you look at the lives of the working poor in New York during much of the 19th Century, there are many parallels. The horros of the middle passage are unspeakable but the horrors of many immigrant ships were terrible also.

Historian Nell Painter argues a theory of "Soul Murder." She aruges that the effects of slavery were so damaging to all of American Society, both black and white, that we are still feeling it today. She argues that the dysfunctional families of today are the result of the violence experiences of both black and while children during the 19th century. Her argument is interesting, but in it she fails to consider the effects on white society of such events as orphan children shipped West, the abandoned family as a result of immigration, alcoholism and death. Surely these events have long range consequences in contemporary society. Quinn includes all of these in his marvelous book.

By way of criticism I thought the book was a tad long. The story of the priest did not seem to add anything to the story and in my humble opinion could have been left out. Some of the sub plots got a little wordy. The point was made and the author could have moved on. I assume that Stephen Foster is used as an example of someone that falls from the upper class to the lower class whereas Bedford is a person that moves up. I'm not sure that Quinn does such a good job of wrapping up the story. In a sense the novel is kind of a look at a period of time in the lives of the characters. The reader is left to speculate as to the rest of their lives.

I first heard about this book when Quinn was interviewed on Public Radio. I bought it and started it and then left it on the shelf for a year or so until I saw in a recommended section in my local book store. That caused me to start it again. Once you get about 50 pages into the book it really kicks in and is a fascinating read. I high recommend BANISHED CHILDREN OF EVE to the student of American History and those interested in the study of Irish immigration.

Historical Fiction as It Should Be
Peter Quinn's "Banished Children of Eve, A Novel of Civil War New York" is everything that historical fiction should be. It is an engaging story laced with characters drawn from history, intertwined with the author's own characters. The result is a novel on an epic scale which captures the gritty flavor of Civil War era Manhattan.

Readers of Doctorow's "Ragtime" or Baker's "Paradise Alley" or Delillo's "Underworld" will find themselves in familiar terrain here. Those not familiar with this type of prose may be put off by the insertion of history into the narrative or may wonder at how exact this history is. There is no doubting the precision of any of Quinn's research. Reading this book hot on the heels of Barnet Schecter's "The Devil's Own Work", I can make that assertion with utmost confidence.

But this, in no way, is meant to take away from the other element of the novel, and that is the sympathy we have for most of the characters. The financier, the archibishop and his assistant, the minstrel player, the maid, the barkeep, and the man who frames the book, James Dunne, breaking/entering and yegg specialist. In no other novel, in my opinion, is the plight of the famine Irish and the generation that followed more poignantly and dramatically portrayed. This book has been in print for over ten years. These are just some of the reasons for that.

Rocco Dormarunno
author of The Five Points, a Novel