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William Kennedy

O Albany!: Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular, Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels Paperback – September 3, 1985

by William J. Kennedy (Author)

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Kennedy's O Albany! is in part the non-fictional stories he covered in his novels, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Kennedy retells the exploits of the bootlegger Jack 'Legs' Diamond, the bungled 1933 kidnapping of John O'Connell, Jr., heir to the Albany Democratic machine and explores the Albany of his past, including its demographics and vanished neighborhoods.

Print length

432 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

September 3, 1985
Grade level

12 and up
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

7.75 x 5.05 x 0.83 inches
ISBN-10

9780140074161
ISBN-13

978-0140074161
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William Kennedy, author, screenwriter and playwright, was born and raised in Albany, New York. Kennedy brought his native city to literary life in many of his works. The Albany cycle, includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed.The versatile Kennedy wrote the screenplay for Ironweed, the play Grand View, and cowrote the screenplay for the The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola. Kennedy also wrote the nonfiction O Albany! and Riding the Yellow Trolley Car. Some of the other works he is known for include Roscoe and Very Old Bones.

Kennedy is a professor in the English department at the State University of New York at Albany. He is the founding director of the New York State Writers Institute and, in 1993, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Literary Lions Award from the New York Public Library, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Governor’s Arts Award. Kennedy was also named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France and a member of the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0140074163
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (September 3, 1985)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780140074161
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140074161
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.75 x 5.05 x 0.83 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #320,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #288 in American Literature Criticism

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David Buckbee

Great history of Albany, NY

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

If you are interested in Albany, NY this is the book !

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cs211

O Albany, we barely knew ye

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 17, 2004

Subtract a star if you're not terribly interested in learning about Albany, NY.

William Kennedy has not achieved his stated aim with "O Albany!": I do not think that people in Kansas City, with no particular interest in learning about Albany, will enjoy "O Albany!" more than Mr. Kennedy's fiction works sited in that city. However, for passionate Kennedy fans interested in learning about his novels' settings, and for anyone with an interest in learning about Albany (more likely a broader audience), "O Albany!" is recommended, with some minor hesitations.

"O Albany!" is a quirky history. To its credit, it most definitely is not a dispassionate, straightforward, chronological history (that would be too dry, and would waste Kennedy's storytelling talents). Instead, "O Albany!" is the author's own anecdotal, personal, episodic slice of Albany's history. Kennedy covers many salient aspects, but plumbs certain subjects too deeply (such as the neighborhoods, and his tendency to cite too many names of people and businesses - this makes for some tedious reading) while only touching upon certain episodes of the lives of more interesting subjects (e.g. Legs Diamond, and the Barnes Republican machine, which preceded the O'Connell Democratic machine with which Kennedy is naturally more acquainted).

The best parts of "O Albany!" are Kennedy's freeform reminiscences about his boyhood neighborhood, and the profiles of the Albany Democratic machine and the shady, corrupt dealings (at all levels, from the governor on down) that were done in order to, slowly and expensively, erect the South Mall. These are far from the only shady dealings described, however. The Albany Democratic party comes across as a cross between the Communists (because of their absolute single-party dominance, and the power of the unelected party chief) and the Mafia. Kennedy offers some reasons why Albany has tolerated this situation, but since he does not lament what Albany would otherwise be (perhaps, a city of more wealth and energy, especially in the private and creative sectors), a critic might call him an apologist. But, although Kennedy has chosen Albany for his home, he does point out the many warts, so he accepts Albany for what it is without being blind to its faults.

Albany has a much more interesting history than I was expecting. It has an image as a drab city dominated by government and its minions of risk-avoiding job-for-life 9-to-5 bureaucrats. The past, and how it came to be the city that it is now, however, is much livelier, and Kennedy captures this in his book.

p.s. Kennedy includes some funny stories, but the funniest joke is perhaps an unintentional one: in the index, the entry for "vote fraud" reads "See Democratic Party".

13 people found this helpful

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P.K. Ryan

An ode to Albany

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 2, 2006

`O Albany!' is a vivid and wonderfully written history of the city of Albany, New York. Part memoir, part history, author William Kennedy fluently intertwines his personal memories and anecdotes with an official history of this significant but largely unknown city. Kennedy is a lifelong native of the city, and his genuine devotion to it-warts and all-is made apparent throughout. Even when describing some of the uglier aspects of the city, he writes with a sort of warm-hearted sentiment similar to a mother's defense of a beloved but wayward child. Kennedy is an Irish-Catholic Democrat and the book is faithfully written from this perspective. His observations are often humorous, and his writing style is smooth and enjoyable.

Founded by the Dutch in 1624, the area was originally a fur trading post named Fort Orange. Forty years later, Fort Orange was acquired by the English and renamed Albany. It was a major political center during colonial and revolutionary times and is one of the oldest chartered cities in North America. This era is only briefly discussed. The 18th and 19th centuries are covered a little more in-depth with such aspects as the massive arrival of Irish immigrants being major contributions to the city's destiny. Where Kennedy really shines is his descriptions of 20th century Albany, complete with gangsters, political bosses, cops, prostitutes, and a lively nightlife. He fluidly surveys the many neighborhoods that make up Albany and the ethnicities that inhabit them. As a lifelong native of Albany's outskirts, there were a few things in the book that I already knew, but the majority of it was new and enlightening to me. I was pleasantly surprised by the complexity and significance of Albany's history and I suspect that `O Albany!' is one of the best sources available to learn about it. Excellent.

9 people found this helpful

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Jay Dickson

Unreal city

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 20, 2008

William Kennedy wrote this informal cultural history of his hometown in 1983, the same year in which he achieved national stature as the author of IRONWEED, his classic novel of Depression-era life in Albany. Although Kennedy's achievement that year is to be marvelled at, it should be noted that much of O ALBANY! is composed of essays he had previously written for a journal, the KNICKERBOCKER NEWS. The book tries to detail almost everything imaginable about the New York capital, which is one of the oldest (and was once one of the most influential) cities in the United States; Kennedy details multiple neighborhoods and multiple eras, from the period of original Dutch settlement to the great construction era of the 1960s when the South Mall was built by Erasmus Corning and Nelson Rockefeller. The level of detail in the book is not only at times unsettling but at times even oppressive: there are sections where Kennedy just lists proper name after proper name of people who were once important to him or to his family: like Joyce in ULYSSES, you get the sense of Kennedy trying to archivally capture the past by writing the city person by person and house by house back into memory. It's a book that is to be admired, but it is not necessarily easy to read. The best parts are the sections where Kennedy allows the narrative to be dominated by larger-than-life personalities, such as the elderly socialite Huybertie Pruyn who, like Kennedy, seems to feel it her burden to encapsulate the history of the city in her written remembrances.

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