It will be difficult to think about the New York City subway system without thinking about this book. I have ridden the subway on occasional trips to NYC and the next time I do I will be definitely be thinking about its history and about these characters, those who built the tunnels and those who lived there. This is an alternating narrative beginning with a man called Treefrog. It’s 1991 and he lives underground in the tunnel with his cat to fend off the rats, off the grid, a self exile caused

I'm totally in awe of Colum McCann, he writes about things that are relevant and he writes it with knowledge and passion.The book is one of light and dark, good and bad , deep tunnels and high places always opposites, always pairs. The characters are so real , so vivid , I loved them but hated them. This is a truly difficult book to read, how the homeless , the drug addicted , the prostitutes live, exist , survive in the tunnels of the subway that goes from Brooklyn to Manhattan , the story of N...

4.5 This book was absolutely gorgeous and bittersweet and overflowing with all these strong and visceral emotions. This novel follows the story of Nathan Walker, a black man who comes to New York at the turn of the century to become a sandhog--people who dig the tunnels that carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. A crazy accident establishes a bond between Walker and his fellow sandhogs--one that spans generations. As this is the first Colum McCann novel I've ever read and I can say with certa...

If I come to an author late, I like to go visit the earlier works, to see the progression. That, and I’m a completist. Having loved Let the Great World Spin and liked Zoli and Transatlantic, I wanted to see where Colum McCann came from. Other than, you know, Ireland.In This Side of Brightness, we see an already competent writer not yet in full confident stride. And there is already a formula, a template: take a relatively obscure historical event or two, connect them with plot lines which take a...

McCann’s third book and second novel, This Side of Brightness has a number of things in common with McCann’s most recent novel, the prize winning Let the Great World Spin. Both novels are set in New York; both involve issues of race, class, and immigration; and both novels are testimonies to the fragility and resilience of the human condition. Some people get crushed by circumstance and choice in McCann’s novels and others endure, struggling on, reclaiming hope from ruin’s ashes. This Side of Br...

I have heard amazing things about This Side of Brightness so I was excited when it was chosen for my book club. However, the book did not resonate with me in the slightest. The story alternates between the the stories of Nathan Walker in the early 20th century and "Treefrog," a homeless man, living in a subway tunnel in the late 20th century. I thought this book was more historical fiction contrasted with present day. Nathan Walker is a "sandhog" who works on the crew digging a tunnel under the

I was absolutely head over heels in love with this book.......until the last chapter. (view spoiler)[Why, why, why did Colum McCann have to put a "happy/hopeful" ending on it? Is it that he thinks this is what the public wants? Well, not me. (hide spoiler)] Definitely this would have gotten five stars if only that last chapter were absent. End it any way but this! That is my sole complaint. Four stars, not five! My heart wants to give this five anyhow.I am going to give you a quote:He played so

This is the first time I sit down with Colum McCann for a good long chat and it won't be the last. 'This Side of Brightness' certainly implies the dark side, the side that does not glitter and shine, the side hidden from view that most of us would rather avoid looking at in real life. It's a story of tunnels, creepy places where sun never shines, needed only to connect one point to another on a subway map. We rarely reflect on tunnels, yet there are people who live there, there were people who b...

I scoff when I hear people say, "I wish I had time to read!" My reading time is at 5:30 in the morning, when I am doing my cardio, rocking out to my music, and trying to balance my book open on those cheap little plastic book "thingys". I have sensed a pattern recently when I listen to an old song from my Ipod and suddenly I am am shot back into a book I read three months, six months, or even two years ago.When I purchase a new song, I will often open up my Ipod and listen to the same three song...

Interesting narrative that alternates between past and present day, about the men who once traded in daily danger to dig NY's train tunnels and the relationships they formed. The writing is deeply humane; one of the back pg. blurbs calls it "an act of piety." It is. A sample:...If they get hurt, they will get hurt close to those they care about -- it's better to die close to family than to commerce. Still, death is seldom mentioned -- even at funerals they say nothing about the way the dead man

I started off really enjoying this book and getting into the historical aspect behind the building of the underground train tunnels of New York. Unfortunately as the book went on it became depressingly easy to see where it was all going - all portents were delivered with an increasingly unsubtle sledgehammer. Therefore there were no surprises. Even though I had problems with Let the Great World Spin at least it had that going for it.That's two books I've read by McCann now in which the hype over...

I think this solidifies Colum McCann as one of my all time favorite authors. You can’t deny the depth of humanity within each of his books. He imbues each character with such beautiful and heartbreaking complexity you feel them living beyond the pages. His unique writing style of building multiple narratives throughout the book only to weave them seamlessly together always has a way of bringing about a deep sense of clarity and revelation by the end. I think his best example of this is in Let th...

Had a potential to get 5 stars in the beginning. But the end was kind of disappointing after reading through 300+ pages. Great premise but not executed properly. This story could have done with some edits to remain crisp and not repetitive.I am definitely going to give Colum McCann a second chance.

This story opens with the homeless man Treefrog throwing bricks. He has seen a bird, a crane he thinks, that is frozen in the river. Will he set it free and afford it another chance at flight? This, for me, was the essence of the book. Men going underground to dig a tunnel and rising to return to thier homes, sometimes. There is a constant shifting between dark and light, being earthbound and flying, stepping lively with elegant balance on steel beams and parking meters. McCann’s writing is beau...

"Our Resurrections Aren't What They Used To Be"It was not always so, but recently, I have come to like Colum McCann a lot. His TransAtlantic came high on my Top Ten of 2013, and Thirteen Ways of Looking figured equally on my 2015 list. Both books are built in sections: TransAtlantic is about four historical journeys (all eastward but one) between America and Ireland; Thirteen Ways consists of a novella and three stories of different lengths. I sense that McCann is most comfortable with s...

You know when your reading life mirrors real life? That's the way I've been living since picking up this book. I couldn't help but note similarities to 2016 race relations, police violence, and heroine addiction when reading.McCann's novel is a family portrait, if you will, of three generations that starts in New York City in the early 1900s and ends in the early 1990s. During that time, he weaves the story of the Walker family, Nathan, a "sandhog" who, along with his immigrant friends, built th...

Rating: 3.75* of fiveHow delightful it is to go back and fill in the high spots in a favorite author's early career. This book, published in 1998, was the third published book by McCann, and showed that his command of language was equal to his command of storytelling. He's a winner of the National Book Award now, but his earlier books don't disappoint in any way. (Well, Songdogs disappointed me, but not severely.)The evocation of the sandhog life in early 20th-century New York was strong, compel...

Start with something positive; I loved the prose of this book. The writing was so smooth and really quite beautiful. That I enjoyed. The actual story...not so much. I was very disappointed after the hype about this book ~ I thought that this would be about the Irish experience in New York and for about a paragraph and a half it was. Much has been said about a white Irishman writing about the black experience, and that I don't have a problem with ~ what I don't like is that the African-American s...

If the second half of this book had been as good as the first, I'd have given it four or five stars. The world of the tunneling sandhogs is wonderful, but the Harlem of the later chapters doesn't have the same texture or flow. I also thought the crucial car-crash was a bit desperate and didn't fit with the rhythms of the book. But McCann's writing is lovely and he doesn't shy away from big subjects and multiple viewpoints. Recommended.

Love all his work. Read this one years ago.