Time for fun comes when the jolly tin peddler visits, or best of all, when the fair comes to town. This is Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved story of how her husband Almanzo grew up as a farmer boy far from the little house where Laura lived.
In 1890, when the book was published, the Lower East Side was a landscape of teeming streets and filthy tenements crowded with immigrants living in dreadful conditions.
A novel set in in America at the turn of the 20th century. It's characters: three remarkable families whose lives become entwined with Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata.
As Ketchum shows us, it was, then as now, a city whose lifeblood was commerce and whose consuming interest was money. However, money was to be made - and its interests defended - in different ways.