Dance Hall: A Novel of Sing Sing
About this audiobook
A Brooklyn stickup artist, his taxi-dancing wife, a murderous newspaperman, a risk-taking warden, and a wife with a dark past converge in 1930s Sing Sing heading toward death, redemption-and Ebbets Field.
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"DANCE HALL: A NOVEL OF SING SING" unveils a grand and riveting tale of a violent and desperate past, unforgettably narrated in a gripping, often wry, fashion--recorded in tears and punctuated in--rarely innocent--blood.
Dance Hall flawlessly transports readers to a seedy, volatile 1930s underworld where love and honor and redemption jostle for mere survival with greed and lust and betrayal.
Dance Hall reveals the story of a Brooklyn stickup artist, his taxi-dancing Filipina spouse, a murderous newspaperman, a risk-taking warden, and a wife with a dark past converging in Sing Sing, destined for love, death, forgiveness, redemption--and Ebbets Field.
Dance Hall reveals a page-turning web of perfectly-balanced back stories: of a young parish priest gone wrong and then right again, of a brutal Bowery killer with escape on his mind, a con man with the vestige of a conscience, a thuggish Garment District goon with a devout sister, a tell-all Broadway gossip columnist who can make or break you, a rat of an accomplice, a once-disgraced private detective who now surprisingly elevates a principle above a paycheck.
Read Dance Hall and you live and breathe life inside cold and desperate prison halls and cells; sweaty and often violent Brooklyn dime-a-dance dance halls; threadbare tenements, back-alley speakeasies where anything you wanted badly enough was for sale; the offices of the rich and powerful and still conflicted; and of a waiting area for Sing Sing's "Death Row" called "The Dance Hall"--all while returning you to Depression days when hope reigned supreme.
Because hope was all you had.
About the author
Award-winning historian David Pietrusza has been called "the undisputed champion of chronicling American Presidential campaigns.” His books include studies of the 1920, 1932, 1948, and 1960 presidential elections and biographies of Theodore Roosevelt (Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal, US History), gambler Arnold Rothstein (Edgar Award finalist) and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (Casey Award winner).
Pietrusza has appeared on NPR, C-SPAN, MSNBC, The Voice of America, The History Channel, AMC, and ESPN. He has spoken at the JFK, FDR, Truman, and Coolidge presidential libraries, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and various universities and festivals.
A former member of the Amsterdam (NY) City Council, he holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University at Albany, is a Recipient of the 2011 Excellence in Arts & Letters Award of the Alumni Association of the University at Albany, and a charter member of the Greater Amsterdam School District Hall of Fame.
Visit: www.davidpietrusza.com
