Quick Take
- Narration: William Hope handles Campanella’s densely detailed prose with steady authority, a performance built for endurance, covering 22 hours without losing its grip.
- Themes: urban identity and reinvention, colonial history and its long shadow, the politics of place-making
- Mood: Scholarly and sweeping, with occasional bursts of neighborhood-level intimacy
- Verdict: Campanella’s Brooklyn is the kind of urban history that changes how you walk through a city, exhaustive in the best sense, and William Hope makes the 22 hours feel earned.
I grew up reading Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro, so I came to Brooklyn: The Once and Future City with a particular set of expectations. I expected a good urban history. I did not expect to spend a week genuinely absorbed in the rise and fall and stubborn resurrection of a single American borough. Thomas Campanella writes with the obsessive detail of a man who has spent his whole career thinking about cities and specifically this one, and William Hope’s narration, steady and authoritative across 22 hours, makes the whole enterprise feel like a privilege rather than homework.
I was somewhere in the middle chapters, deep in the postwar urban renewal disasters, when it occurred to me that this is one of the few histories I’ve encountered that takes seriously both the romance and the damage of city-making. Campanella doesn’t let Brooklyn off the hook for its own failures. He doesn’t let its residents off the hook either. But he also genuinely loves the place, and that love makes the hard chapters bearable.
From Leni Lenape to Global Brand
The scope of Brooklyn is genuinely ambitious: Campanella begins with the Leni Lenape and their homeland before Dutch colonization, traces the region’s transformation into a dense slaveholding community (a history that often gets compressed in celebratory Brooklyn narratives), and follows the arc through to Brooklyn’s current status as an internationally recognized brand, celebrated and scorned in equal measure. That phrase from the synopsis, celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world, captures the ambivalence Campanella brings throughout: Brooklyn’s recent success is real, but it comes loaded with the weight of everything that made that success possible and the costs it has extracted along the way.
The Bibliophile MK XLI review describing the book as a slow-motion highlight reel of colonial violence and its rebranding is not wrong, exactly, though it misses the way Campanella holds that violence in tension with genuine community resilience. He is clear-eyed about the slaveholding history, the racist public housing and highway projects of the Robert Moses era, and the displacement that accompanied recent gentrification. The history is not comfortable, and it’s not meant to be.
What Campanella Finds in the Buildings
Like Tinniswood with British stately homes, Campanella uses architecture as his primary evidence. Buildings hold memory in ways that other records don’t: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Prospect Park as the anchor of an open space system that was supposed to extend all the way to Manhattan; the doomed bid to erect the world’s tallest building; the public housing projects that became traps for the people they were built to help. Each of these built or unbuilt things tells a story about who Brooklyn thought it was and who it thought it was building for. The accompanying PDF mentioned in the listing, with maps and photographs, adds a visual dimension that the audio alone can’t fully provide, so I’d suggest having it open if you’re listening at a desk rather than on a commute.
The ulysses4 review describing this as magisterial gets at something real. Campanella writes with the confidence of a historian who knows he has the sources and the argument to support everything he claims. It’s a book that takes Brooklyn seriously as a subject worthy of that kind of rigor.
Hope’s Narration at Marathon Length
At 22 hours and 23 minutes, Brooklyn is a significant commitment, and William Hope’s performance is what makes it sustainable. He doesn’t dramatize, this is scholarly history, not narrative nonfiction in the Kidder mode, and it requires a narrator who can hold the listener’s attention through dense analytical passages as well as the more colorful anecdotal sections. Hope does this through consistency and intelligence: his pace varies naturally with the text, his handling of proper names and historical detail is precise, and he never sounds like he’s just getting through it. That last quality matters more than almost anything else in a long listen.
For the Serious Urban History Reader
Brooklyn is for listeners who want the full complexity of a place rather than its mythology. It rewards those willing to sit with 22 hours of carefully researched, often uncomfortable history, and it delivers something genuinely valuable at the end: an understanding of how a city gets made, unmade, and remade, and what human costs that process involves. If you want a quicker, breezier introduction to Brooklyn’s stories, The Bowery Boys audiobook does that in 86 minutes. If you want the real thing, Brooklyn is it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Brooklyn: The Once and Future City accessible to listeners who aren’t from New York or the US?
Campanella writes for a general audience and provides enough context that non-American and non-New York listeners can follow the argument. That said, familiarity with American urban history, Moses, urban renewal, postwar highway politics, enriches the experience significantly.
How does Campanella handle the colonial and slaveholding history of early Brooklyn?
Directly and without softening. The Dutch slaveholding community that developed in Kings County is covered in detail, and the long shadow of that history is traced through subsequent chapters. This is one of the aspects that distinguishes Brooklyn from more celebratory urban histories.
Is the accompanying PDF essential for the audio experience?
Not essential, but genuinely useful, maps and photographs add a visual anchor for a text that references many specific places and buildings. Worth having open for the chapters on urban planning and architecture in particular.
At 22 hours, how does the book handle the period from the 1980s to the present day, the era of gentrification and Brooklyn’s rebranding?
Campanella is as rigorous about recent history as he is about the colonial and industrial periods, treating gentrification as a continuation of the borough’s pattern of transformation rather than an unprecedented rupture. The tension between displacement and renewal gets serious analytical attention.
