Paradise Alley

by Kevin Baker

Three remarkable women have nothing but one another to rely on as they seek to protect their homes and families from the brutality of a city -- and a nation -- gone mad. Paradise Alley is a story of the intersection of the Irish- and African-American experiences in the crucible of nineteenth-century New York -- of race and hatred, of love and war, of risk and dauntless courage. At the height of the Civil War, what begins with strong words and a few broken bottles will, over the course of five days, escalate into the worst urban conflagration in American history. Hundreds of thousands of poor Irish immigrants smolder with resentment against a war and a president that have cost them so many of their young men. When word spreads throughout New York's immigrant wards that a military draft is about to be implemented -- a draft from which any rich man's son with $300 can buy an exemption -- trouble begins to spill into the streets. Down in the waterfront slum of Paradise Alley, three women -