Set in New York City at the turn of the last century among the sandhogs who hand-dug the tunnels under New York for subways and other traffic and the homeless people who occupy them today. I’ve read and enjoyed McCann’s style in the past. Believe I find the sandhogs more sympathetic than the street-people.
It was Henry David Thoreau who said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Colum McCann is able to find drama in the most mundane of lives and make us care for their joys and pains. They seem to come alive on the page and enter our field of vision.
As the story progresses we move from digging under the ground to high steel and the two story-lines meld into one. When a black man marries an Irish lass their chocolate coloured children arrive with crinkled flaming red hair. Practical minded rather than vindictive when hate messages wrapped around bricks crash through their apartment windows they rent an apartment too high for the bricks to reach.
It was Henry David Thoreau who said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Colum McCann is able to find drama in the most mundane of lives and make us care for their joys and pains. They seem to come alive on the page and enter our field of vision.
As the story progresses we move from digging under the ground to high steel and the two story-lines meld into one. When a black man marries an Irish lass their chocolate coloured children arrive with crinkled flaming red hair. Practical minded rather than vindictive when hate messages wrapped around bricks crash through their apartment windows they rent an apartment too high for the bricks to reach.
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