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Crooked River Burning

3.64 of 5 stars 3.64 · rating details · 166 ratings · 35 reviews

The critically acclaimed novel of a compelling love affair and the decline of a once prosperous city .

The birthplace of rock 'n' roll, Cleveland was an economic powerhouse and America's sixth-largest city in the late 1940s. By 1969, it had dropped to twelfth. In the summer of 1948, fourteen-year-old David Zielinsky can look forward to a job at the docks, the only way to ma...more

Paperback, 592 pages

Published October 12th 2001 by Mariner Books (first published January 18th 2001)

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Fiction Set in Cleveland

62nd out of 100 books — 9 voters

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Jan 11, 2008 Tracy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, cleveland-ohio

A mix of fictional and real characters paints a rich portrait of an industrial city from a period of strength in the late forties to the beginning of serious decline in 1969. From the blue collar "ethnics" (my people) to the mafia to baseball of a bygone era, Mark Winegardner weaves together a fascinating array of stories and people.

The writer, a onetime Cleveland resident, captures the personality of the city so well. His dialogue for those blue collar "ethnics" is spot on. And along the way,...more

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May 23, 2007 Caroline rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Laura

This book was long and it felt very long. By the end, I didn't care about any of the characters, except the minor ones, the ones that had died and the real life historical figures. Which is sad, because I started off caring so much about the main characters. They couldn't keep my interest. What did keep my interest is the prose. Very good throughout, with a sentence every once in a while that would blow me away. I really liked the parts about Cleveland history and how real people were woven into...more

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Jun 19, 2011 Darlene rated it 4 of 5 stars

A great friend gave me this book a while back and I put it on my challenge list for the year. I wasn't sure about it. It's a story about Cleveland and having lived in or near Pittsburgh for a large part of my life and just instinctively feeling that rivalry and dislike that exists, I didn't know if this would be a story that captured me. Having finished the book, I can say that I am SO glad I read this book!! This was a fantastic story! Actually, there was enough for two stories in this book. T...more

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May 29, 2011 Carly Thompson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, historical-fiction

This is a very long, slowly paced novel. It was a long novel that felt extremely long. Although it took me about a week and a half to read it, I felt at times that I had been reading it for months. Winegardner writes very detailed prose that vividly captures mid-century Cleveland and is very informative but it can feel like a slog to get through. Throughout the story, Winegardner would intersperse chapters about important Cleveland personalities (Alan Freed, Vic Wertz, a Cleveland Indians baseba...more This is a very long, slowly paced novel. It was a long novel that felt extremely long. Although it took me about a week and a half to read it, I felt at times that I had been reading it for months. Winegardner writes very detailed prose that vividly captures mid-century Cleveland and is very informative but it can feel like a slog to get through. Throughout the story, Winegardner would intersperse chapters about important Cleveland personalities (Alan Freed, Vic Wertz, a Cleveland Indians baseball player, Dorothy Fuldheim, a local television commentator/journalist, Louis Seltzer, the powerful editor of the Cleveland Press Newspaper, and Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a white majority city) that covered their entire lives from birth to death (although not told in chronological order) that were interesting but often pulled away from the primary narrative of the lives of David and Anne. Most of the narrative was in the third person, but frequently Winegardner would switch to a strident second-person view (“You were the sort of person around whom myths arose. You said so yourself.” p. 244) The abrupt switches were an interesting stylistic choice but they created an unseen authority that didn’t work with the more intimate relationship story.

I liked the wide swath of Clevelandian history that the novel encompassed (although I am not a sports fan and found the sections on the Cleveland Indians and the Browns rather tedious). However the main characters of David and Anne were not interesting enough or sympathetic enough to sustain such a long narrative. David was dull and strangely incurious about his mother who died when he was a child (there are allegations that she was killed by the mob or his mob connected father) and Anne was at times an unlikeable rich girl. The author told us that David and Anne were perfect for each other and meant to be together more often than showing the readers their connection. Anne and David enjoy challenging each other at sports (golf, ping pong, bowling) and we are told they enjoy each other’s company but I failed to believe that theirs is a great love story.(less)

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Feb 18, 2012 Emma rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book was long and divided. Half the story was about the (depressing) decline of Cleveland in the 1950s and 60s. The other half was a (disappointing) love story about a rich girl and a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. During the first 300 pages, I was really invested in the characters, but towards the end, I found myself disliking where the plot and development was going.

Despite this, overall I enjoyed the book. The prose is extremely dense, with delicious descriptions and sweeping na...more

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Feb 22, 2010 Marti rated it 4 of 5 stars

My husband recommended this book to me. It is about Cleveland, and that's where my mother's family lived. It is a sort of two part book--some sections are factual, about real people and events, and then there is a recurring love story between David Zielinsky, the 'poor' boy, and the aristocratic Anne O'Connor, from the political family. He goes into politics after marrying the nurse, Irene and having three children, but eventually Irene leaves him for a doctor. In the meantime Anne goes from bei...more

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Oct 18, 2012 Vikki rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-reads

if i could give this book two ratings, i would: four stars for the somewhat-fictionalized history of cleveland, 1952-1969, two stars for the absurd and unsatisfying love story that is the frame for it. i'd be interested to know whether anyone who's not from cleveland has read this book, and if so whether they enjoyed it. as a cleveland native the story was personal to me, and i thoroughly enjoyed the five or six "sidebar" chapters that profiled cleveland heroes--particularly dorothy fuldheim, wh...more

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Oct 25, 2008 Khaya rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people from Cleveland

Recommended to Khaya by: on loan from Shelly (who hasn't read it yet)

Shelves: historicalfiction

Originally I thought I would give this book 3 stars, because it had distinct strengths and weaknesses which initially averaged out to a reaction of, as La Petite would say, "meh-whatever." I ended up lowering the rating to 2 stars, though, because I felt the book was way too long, and that Winegardener went into great detail in describing some less relevant episodes/characters while totally skipping over aspects of the story with the potential to be really interesting. Although I sort of underst...more Originally I thought I would give this book 3 stars, because it had distinct strengths and weaknesses which initially averaged out to a reaction of, as La Petite would say, "meh-whatever." I ended up lowering the rating to 2 stars, though, because I felt the book was way too long, and that Winegardener went into great detail in describing some less relevant episodes/characters while totally skipping over aspects of the story with the potential to be really interesting. Although I sort of understand why he did this, it didn't appeal to me.

This book reminded me of “The Last Convertible” and of another book (I'm blanking on the title right now) where the time/place seemed to be its own character. 1950s-1960s Cleveland was very much a character in the book, perhaps the main one, and much attention and detail were devoted to developing that character. Although "Crooked River Burning" (like "The Last Convertible") was also the story of a star-crossed love, the love story almost felt like the backdrop to the story of Cleveland in the '50s-'60s, as opposed to vice versa. Maybe if I were from Cleveland, I would have cared enough to appreciate this balance. As someone not from Cleveland and not particularly interested in Cleveland (and Winegardener did not succeed in inspiring my interest in Cleveland, although to be fair, that would have been a pretty impressive feat), I would have preferred to just read about the love story and the various interactions around that.

For example, although I finally did realize what the “moondog” chapter was doing there, it took me a while and I don’t think it needed to be that long/detailed. It was way disproportionate to its actual relevance and apparently minor role in the story. Ditto for the long, detailed baseball games. Although they later proved to have some relevance to the overall plot, and were probably also ways of making the time/place its own character, I just didn’t care and ended up skimming over these details.

I had a similar reaction to the chapters about Dorothy Fuldheim and Louie Seltzer (and the moondog one about Alan Freed, come to think of it), which also reminded me of some of the weirder chapters of “The Ten-Year Nap” – the ones which described the inner thoughts of people like Nadia Comaneci and Margaret Thatcher. What’s with these authors and inserting these lengthy asides imagining mundane vignettes in the lives of celebrities? I find that they really take me out of the story, and don’t seem to serve a purpose that I can see. After a while, I didn’t even bother reading them; I just skipped over them to get back to the main characters.

I feel like if Winegardener were really good, he could have succeeded in making me care about these characters even though they had only marginal relevance to the love story. Well, he didn’t. Additionally, the realist in me says, oh, please, how could anyone possibly know what Nadia Comaneci was thinking as she rode in the car or how Dorothy Fuldheim interacted with her co-workers off the air? If I were reading an entire imagined biography of a celebrity, I might choose to suspend my disbelief if it meant enjoying a fun and interesting read. But to insert it as a random chapter with little apparent relevance to the plot I’m actually following – why? I don’t know why editors allow this. It really doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, many potentially interesting and dramatic moments were totally skipped over. How did David and Anne’s quasi-platonic reunion develop into a full-fledged affair? How did their affair progress, and then break off? Although we’re exposed to one vignette where they’re together, it doesn’t give us a whole lot of information about their dynamics and their overall relationship. How did Irene learn about it? And whoa -- David and Irene got divorced? Irene left David for a surgeon? When? What? These aspects of the story, rife with potential for internal and external conflict, were totally glossed over while boring details of baseball games and imagined celebrity scenarios were painfully spelled out.

On the positive side, I found this book extremely readable, even compulsively so. Winegardner evoked the time and place well; you could really visualize the characters and their interactions. His prose was somehow addictive, even when the story itself wasn’t always compelling. In fact, it’s an interesting experience to read a book where the prose is so much more compelling than the actual story. I often found myself obsessively reading, unable to put the book down, and then finally stopping and asking myself, “So what? What was the point, and why, exactly, was that passage so interesting to me?” and unable to answer the question.

Having said that, the writing did occasionally got annoying. For example: “From downstairs came the sound of a wailing trumpet…Twenty years later, David would purchase a copy of this very Louis Armstrong record. Twenty years after that, he’d replace the worn-out record with a compact disc. But now, he had no clue or even, in this respect, a desire for one.” Paragraphs like these were frequent interruptions which were irritating and took me out of the story, and I couldn’t really see the point.

There were also some instances of really shoddy editing. For example, why does Anne tell David she’s not a virgin, and later lose her virginity to some other guy? If she had a reason for wanting David to think she wasn't a virgin when she actually was, the book doesn't make this clear. Why does it first describe David as an eager hugger, and then, later in the book, report that he had reluctantly become a hugger due to his political career but that he still felt uncomfortable, especially hugging his family? I know these things are kind of petty, but they annoy me as a reader -- I really want to immerse myself in the story and characters, and can't when details like this keep changing.

Overall, I do have to give Winegardener credit for inspiring me to write such a lengthy and detailed review, as opposed to simply saying "Dumb book -- don't bother." I was compelled to finish it, although I definitely did a lot of skimming, especially toward the end. Maybe it really deserves 2.5 stars. It certainly wasn't terrible -- with a better editor, it might have actually been a decent read.

(less)

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Aug 22, 2011 J. Robert Ewbank rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: a-good-read, novel, historical

This book by Mark Winegardner told me more about Cleveland than I knew, and more than I really was interested in knowing. He weas able to develop a few interesting characters and go with them over time. I did learn some interesting things about Cleveland, but it was a little difficult read for me. Some others I am sure will find a lot of good reading in this book because there is a lot of information packed in the story.

J. Robert Ewbank, author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the 'Isms'"

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Jun 05, 2012 Jeff rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

A class crossed love story that covers three decades of Cleveland history. Winegardner can write baseball, creates strong characters, and scratches out dialogue that sticks with you. One of my favorite lines is by a cynical townie who tells his somewhat estranged son that everything "is what it is. And also something else." Can't help but wonder whether Winegardner adapted, and subsequently twisted, that phrase from Belichick during his browns days.

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May 18, 2013 Leslie Crete rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a superbly written book that is very difficult to read. A long, detailed, densely packed love/hate note to the city of Cleveland, full of history and painfully real characters. I found it both fascinating and frustrating, and at times a little boring - but absolutely worth the effort. You will feel FULL at the end. A must read for all Clevelanders.

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Feb 26, 2009 Lauren rated it 4 of 5 stars

A bit disappointing at the end. Fun to have set in the context of Cleveland and its history from the 40's through the 70's but never develops the characters or plot as much as one expects.

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Mar 01, 2011 RUSA CODES rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: notable-books-2002

This was one of the 2002 RUSA Notable Books winners. For the complete list, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rus...

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May 13, 2012 Kendra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Winegardner gets Cleveland so right. This is core curriculum if you are a native Clevelander and understand the great east side/west side divide. The romance was believable, the mysteries were not as believable but the details, the nuances that the author captures about the characters and the decisions they might have made in the context of a history of a place that has always had an inferiority complex are quite masterfully done.

I started this book shortly before I had my son. My son turns two...more

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Jan 12, 2009 Joe rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very interesting social history of Cleveland. Could have ended about 200 pages earlier though.

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Aug 25, 2009 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

Winegardner matched history with fiction so perfectly that I kept wanting to Google the characters to see what they’re up to now.

Winegardener's book weaves the story of two people falling in love against the background of Cleveland history. That might not seem like the most interesting or romantic scenario, but Winegardener writes a very personal story interspersed with short narratives about Cleveland's famous and infamous citizens. That these historic sidebars are heavily footnoted add to thei...more

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Mar 17, 2011 Debra marked it as to-read

Shelves: sai-king-recommends

Stephen King says: "A great American novel about...Cleveland? Yes, children, this is the real deal — by the man who has revived Mario Puzo's Godfather characters with such wit and élan."

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Sep 30, 2011 Rose rated it 4 of 5 stars

Well done.

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Apr 19, 2013 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was familiar with Winegardner from his Godfather sequels but had this on the list for many years. Finally got to it. Not the greatest book I've ever read, but extremely well-written and the story moves along well enough. In short, a love story intertwined with the history of Cleveland from the early 1950s to 1969.

If you grew up in Cleveland and are over, say, forty-five years old, you should absolutely read this book.

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Feb 28, 2013 Channing rated it 5 of 5 stars

I never give books a five-star rating, but this was definitely five-star worthy.

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Feb 19, 2008 Cara Loughlin rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-book-club

Interesting writing style that may throw some people off. The 3rd person narrator often jumps in to give information of past or future events (think 'Pushing Daisies'). The story is mainly of Cleveland, at its mid-century height then the beginning of its decline, told through the lives of 2 main characters, neither of which is very likeable. Reading this will give you an idea how Cleveland became the loser town it is today.

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Apr 17, 2008 Clare rated it 4 of 5 stars

A proud Clevelander will love the settings & historical Cleveland info. Even if you're not a Clevelander, the plot and characters are interesting.
A bit slow at the start, the novel finally takes off with great illustrations of the social underpinnings & struggles of its time. You get a clear and engaging picture of how current events affect the characters' daily lives.
I enjoyed watching history come to life.

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May 15, 2010 Kara rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Although I did learn a little more about my new hometown, Cleveland, I was very disappointed in the style of this book. A long read that didn't consistently tie together, moving between history (sports, politics) and a love story.

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Oct 08, 2012 Amy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historicalfiction, localarea, book-discussion-books

I loved this story and learned a lot about the history of Cleveland (east vs. west) from reading this book. Winegardner ably weaves together the fictional story of David Zielinsky, a young-man from the ethic, blue-collar, west-side and beautiful Anne O'Connor who hails from snooty Shaker Heights with stories of real-life characters such as Dorothy Fuldheim, Carl Stokes, Alan Freed and more!

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Sep 28, 2010 Holly rated it 2 of 5 stars

There were some interesting Cleveland facts scattered throughout the book, but, like other reviewers have commented, it was about 200 pages too long. By the time I got to the end, I had lost interest in the main characters. I would only recommend this book to Cleveland natives who would be interested in the references to Cleveland landmarks.

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Nov 17, 2010 James rated it 2 of 5 stars

Only made it to p. 129. Too boring.

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Oct 30, 2007 Andy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: own

Best thing I read in 2005. Angela suggested it. It may be more poignant for a native Clevelander, but would still be remarkable to anyone, I think.

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Nov 07, 2008 Gretchen rated it 2 of 5 stars

Good news friends, the Indians just won the World Series and beat Boston to do it! That's about as far as I've gotten in this one.

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Aug 24, 2009 Eric Miller rated it 5 of 5 stars

Beautifully written book about the trials and triumphs of Cleveland. Really brings the time and place alive.

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Sep 13, 2008 Millerman marked it as to-read

I have wanted to read Winegardner for quite awhile - this is supposed to be representative of his style.

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