MEET YOU IN ATLANTIC CITY: TRAVELS IN
SPRINGSTEEN’S NEW JERSEY
By James Pettifer
Interlink Books
interlinkbooks.com
On “Thunder Road,” the opening cut of his breakthrough album “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen offered one of his more memorable lines about the excitement and romance of driving down the highway: “Well, the night’s bustin’ open, these two lanes will take us anywhere.”
Some would argue that there are few places in New Jersey, even in the dead of night, where roads aren’t perpetually jammed: It has the highest population density of any state in the country. It’s also been linked in the public mind with mobsters (“The Sopranos”) and pollution (the highest number of Superfund sites of any state, according to several sources).
So maybe it takes a Brit — and a big Bruce Springsteen fan — to write a book about the Garden State that explores the state’s important role in American history and culture. James Pettifer, who teaches Balkan history at Oxford University, examines New Jersey’s story through the lens of Springsteen songs in “Meet You In Atlantic City” (the title is a variation of a line from the Springsteen song “Atlantic City”).
In the book, published by Interlink Books of Northampton, Pettifer chronicles a stint in New Jersey in 2007-2008, when he was a visiting scholar at Princeton University and spent time following Springsteen’s “Magic” tour, an album the Jersey-born star released at a time when growing numbers of Americans had become disenchanted with the Iraq War and the George W. Bush administration.
“[New Jersey] is the state whose name is a metaphor for crime and corruption, and the best television crime series ever made, ‘The Sopranos,’ has not assisted,” Pettifer writes. “Yet it remains an ambiguous labyrinth … a confused and unending urban sprawl in the eyes of its critics, a ferment of life and creativity as seen by its friends.”
Indeed, as Pettifer filters his narrative through Springsteen’s lyrics and his biography, and through interviews with the Boss’s fans, he finds much to like: “New Jersey is a more interesting place than people think. Bruce Springsteen’s music is part of the tradition of millennial hope deep in the subconscious of the state.”
“Meet You in Atlantic City” rambles through the state’s history like one of Springsteen’s road-bound characters, looking at the native Americans who called the land home, Revolutionary War battles like Monmouth Courthouse that shaped the conflict, the growth of organized labor — and organized crime — and the contrast today between downtrodden cities like Trenton and the wealth and privilege of Princeton.
Pettifer also visits the long Jersey shore on the Atlantic Ocean, finding beauty in its vast sand dunes and mysterious marshes but also noting how the beaches appear threatened by the rising seas and violent storms spurred by climate change.
Still, he writes, “the American Dream depends on hope,” and New Jersey is a place worth exploring to find some of that hope. “Be alive in a unique way, as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band inspire you to be in their music (whatever the system throws at you).”
THE HUNDRED WELLS OF SALAGA
By Ayesha Harruna Attah
Other Press
ayeshaattah.com
Ayesha Harruna Attah, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College who now lives in Senegal, is a native of Ghana. Her third book, “The Hundred Wells of Salaga,” is a historical novel set in 19th-century Ghana, on the cusp of the colonial era, that looks at the changing dynamics of the country through the eyes of two young women, Aminah and Wurche.
Aminah, a teenager when the book opens, lives a peaceful life in a small village with her father, his two wives and their various children. But things change abruptly when she’s kidnapped by masked men and forced on a dangerous journey, ending in the market town of Salaga.
Salaga is an important slave-trading center, with 100 wells that were built so that slaves can be washed before sale. It’s here that Aminah is purchased by Wurche, the daughter of a powerful chief whose reign has long profited from the sale of slaves within Africa.
Wurche is an independent-minded young woman who has little interest in being married; instead, she wants a seat at the table of her father’s kingdom. But that kingdom is now threatened by conflict with other tribal leaders and with the encroachment in Ghana of the British and Germans. As a result, Wurche is married off by her father to a rival chieftain to try and secure an alliance.
As the lives of Wurche and Aminah become more closely entwined, the plot, with its mix of romance and geopolitics, deepens considerably. Kirkus Reviews praises “The Hundred Wells of Salaga” for its “fully realized” portraits of Aminah and Wurche and notes that though the novel’s plotting can sometimes “feel rushed,” Attah is “adept at leading readers across the varied terrain of 19th-century Ghana and handles heavy subjects with aplomb.”
Ayesha Harruna Attah will read from her new novel Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Hooker Auditorium at Mount Holyoke College, in an event jointly sponsored by the college and the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley. Visit odysseybks.com/event-rsvp to register for the free event.
In other book-related news: “The Captives,” the debut novel by Northampton author Debra Jo Immergut, has been nominated for an Edgar Award, a top prize for mystery writing in books and television. “The Captives,” published last summer by HarperCollins/Ecco Press, is one of five finalists in the category of Best First Novel by an American Author.
Immergut, who began her novel back in the 1990s but put it aside for years before revising it, says she’s both thrilled and amazed by her nomination, given her book’s long march to completion: “It is truly an incredible and unlikely turn — possibly stranger than fiction.”
Winners of the Edgar Award are expected to be announced in late April or early May.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.