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" More than anything, Dreamland (HarperCollins, $26)is a novel about love--love and kindness, generosity and endurance, in spite of it all. Dickensian in scope and intellectual breadth, Kevin Baker&amp;#039;s (dare it be said?) masterpiece is Ragtime but without the sprawling misanthropy; Tom Wolfe but with characters that are human, not merely theoretical; Dreiser but superbly written; Sinclair Lewis but with a mystic&amp;#039;s heart.  It&amp;#039;s just what we were waiting for: the return of the political novel. No, it covers no new ground, either stylistically or thematically, and, yes, it could have easily been written twenty-five or seventy-five years ago. But Baker&amp;#039;s galloping, grandiose epic is a virtuoso performance. It is, in bald, awful summary, a lavish, 512-page novel about the immigrant experience in New York City at the beginning of the century.  What&amp;#039;s extraordinary about Dreamland is its capacity to transfix. Its primary plot has to do with a young Jewish woman, Esther (feminist, strike leader, police whipping girl, Sydney Carton--esque martyr, badass, and a worker at the doomed Triangle Shirtwaist Factory), and her Lithuanian-refugee lover, the tricky Kid Twist. There are countless labyrinthine subplots here. The poisonous Tammany Hall politician Big Tim Sullivan, with his kickbacks and his VD. Esther&amp;#039;s low-life brother, Gyp, who wants Kid dead. Gyp&amp;#039;s girlfriend, the sad whore Sadie, whom Gyp creepily enlists to keep tabs on Esther. The erudite dwarf and his imperious missus, who live in the quarantine of their toy town--a dwarf-sized Coney Island sideshow. The headshrinkers Freud and Jung, who visit New York to spread the cause of psychoanalysis and are grossed out by the vulgar spectacle America presents.  Dreamland&amp;#039;s conclusion is inevitable, of course, and when, with a puff of smoke, it ends, it&amp;#039;s as if a magic trick has happened. And a miracle has materialized right before our eyes. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a1481/jew-lithuanian-dwarf-0399/>