This Side of Brightness (Wheeler Compass) [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Colum McCann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999 | Series: Wheeler Compass

At the turn of the century, Nathan Walker comes to New York City to take the most dangerous job in the country. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed, the sandhogs—black, white, Irish, Italian—dig together, the darkness erasing all differences. Above ground, though, the men keep their distance until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow sandhogs that will both bless and curse three generations.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This Side of Brightness weaves historical fact with fictional truth, creating a remarkable tale of death, racism, homelessness--and yes, love--spanning four generations. Two characters dominate Colum McCann's narrative: Treefrog, a homeless man with a dark and shameful secret, and Nathan Walker, a black man who came north in the early years of the century to work as a "sandhog," digging the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan. Tunneling is perhaps the most dangerous occupation a man could have; in the close, dark, and dangerous pits far beneath the city streets, differences such as color or ethnic background cease to matter, and Walker soon becomes friends with his crewmates: two Irishmen and an Italian. Then an explosion in one of the tunnels literally blows Walker and three other men up through the earth and into the East River. Walker survives, but his best friend Con O'Leary is never found. Leary leaves behind a wife and young daughter whom Walker marries many years later.

Walker's tale is told in alternating chapters with Treefrog's, who, before his slide into homelessness, chose a hazardous profession--this one high up in the bright sunlight--as a construction worker building skyscrapers. But madness has brought Treefrog out of the light and back to the tunnels that Walker helped dig as he scrapes out a meager existence among the drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and petty criminals that make up the homeless community. But the grimness of McCann's tale is leavened by the beauty of his prose and the intimations all through the book that, even on this side of darkness, redemption is possible. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Called "New York's most visible up-and-coming Irish writer" by the New York Times, McCann skillfully evokes early 20th-century New York, where Irish mixed with African Americans and Italians to dig the tunnel under the East River.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 335 pages
• Publisher: Compass Press (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568955871
• ISBN-13: 978-1568955872
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,734,450 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty languages. He has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. He has been named one of Esquire's "Best and Brightest," and his short film Everything in This Country Must was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program. He lives in New York City with his wife and their three children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Work, August 20, 2002

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: This Side of Brightness: A Novel (Hardcover)

Colum McCann has written a beautiful book with his work, "This Side of Brightness". Beautiful in this case may seem odd, but I would use the word here as I would use it to describe a work by John Steinbeck. Human nature and behavior often has trouble rising above decent much less beautiful, but a talented writer can bring painful lives and experiences to paper in prose that is wonderful to read. The pain that is documented is not minimized, rather written in a way that allows the truth to remain unvarnished, and the prose to be rendered by an artist like Mr. McCann.

I have read about the men who dug the excavations for the caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge, but never for the hundreds of miles of tunnels throughout the boroughs of New York. Tunneling is an extremely dangerous occupation, and if possible is even more hazardous when tunneling under water. The men must work in highly pressurized rooms in order to keep the river from collapsing in upon them, and yet the pressure cannot be so great that the air violates the walls of the chamber blowing outward as opposed to being crushed. The book documents a true story of men that were literally pushed through the walls of the tunnel they were digging until ejected in to the river and then being blown out of the water. To live through such an experience has to rank with the most remarkable stories of survival.

The book shares two lives that are revealed in parallel as far as narrative, but are intertwined in practice. The lives of both men are occupied at various times by living/working underground, but ultimately one life is spent and finally ends beneath the river, while for the other it is a refuge that ultimately allows him to emerge once again to life above ground leaving his demons buried.

The author also explores prejudice in a variety of forms, and from the book's very beginning shows prejudice and racism for the absolute stupidity it is. Men of various color and ethnic backgrounds enter a vicious working environment where they not only work together but are willing to risk their lives for each other. Black, white, Irish, Italian, Polish, none of these characteristics have any meaning when below ground, once returned to the surface every vile behavior associated with race, and religion once again is in full blossom. Church leaders reinforce the worst and most ignorant tenets of institutional stupidity; de facto Jim Crow rules dehumanize its victims.

Colum McCann does not shy away from any topic of traditional controversy. He takes the reader through generations of a family begun by a white wife and her black husband, their children who are born in to a world that hates them even more than their all black father, if that is possible.

There is one issue I am unclear on and it stems from a quote on the jacket of the book. Frank McCourt writes of McCann's, "having been there", when he writes about homeless living under the city. My question is whether the author did live there for a time while writing this book, or whether he actually was homeless for a period of time. In either event it took courage to live there as an observer, and if the latter, both courage and a willingness to share a desperately difficult and personal part of his life.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Watching The River Flow, May 16, 2005

By 

R. J MOSS (Alice Springs, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This Side of Brightness: A Novel (Paperback)

'This Side of Brightness' is a throbbingly good read which trawls the making of the underclass in trenchant prose. The voice is unmistakably McCanns', though the subject matter recalls the marvellous McCarthy's,'Suttree' and my favourit Ondatjee,'Skin of the Lion'. The fact of 'blackness' cuts through this tale. Using time shifts in alternating chapters, we reach the intersection between 1916 and 1991 as the third generation descendant of an Afro American tunnel builder, Clarence'Treefrog' Walker, copes with his family's checquered past. His grandmother was mowed down by car, his father murders the driver and is in turn done in by the cops. His mum turns to drink and then smack which kills her. He's raised by grandfather, Nathan. Some years after he marries and has a child. The rock in his life, the old man dies.He spins out and the wife, unable to tolerate his disintegration, abandons him taking the child. The gradual recognition of these connexions unfolds against the nefarious netherworld of New York's subterranean culture. Once an acrobatic genius on sky-scraper scaffolding, with his world imploding,Treefrog enters tunnel life, a descent with a radically different drive from the heroic grandfather. Treefrog rescues an attractive, drug-addicted whore from the violent clutches of a fellow denizen. Making love, a seeming reconciliation of emotions for his mother and wife, he is determined to, once again, scale the brighter world. The seemingly futile gesture which introduces him on the first page: freeing a heron from the frozen Hudson River, is given fresh resonance.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, surprising magical read!, June 11, 2004

By 

KDMask (Rochester, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: This Side of Brightness: A Novel (Paperback)

This book was a rare find. My brother actually bought it and when I looked on the publishing page, I found it's a first edition. I do believe it will become a classic one day.

Billed as a tale of the "homeless" I found it much more an adult type "Holes"--a magical story that weaves it's way through time, bringing us to a finale that's intertwined with the beginning. It's also a facinating look at the building of the train tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn and the men who toiled underground, now largely forgotten. I especially loved the way history repeated itself through time and space, making the tunnels themselves a character in the book.
You won't be disappointed if you read this great work.