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Learn moreThis audiobook narrated by William Hope provides an unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth century to today
America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades—celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.
Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through Brooklyn’s history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English émigré Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park to anchor an open space system that was to reach back to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn’s emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world.
Campanella also describes Brooklyn’s outsized failures, from Samuel Friede’s bid to erect the world’s tallest building to the long struggle to make Jamaica Bay the world’s largest deepwater seaport, and the star-crossed urban renewal, public housing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar era. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim to its own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban vitality.
Thomas J. Campanella is associate professor of urban studies and city planning at Cornell University and historian-in-residence of the New York City Parks Department. His books include Republic of Shade and The Concrete Dragon, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He divides his time between Ithaca and the Marine Park neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up. Twitter @builtbrooklyn
William Hope was born a fifth generation Montrealer. After high school, he joined the National Youth Theatre in London to perform Shakespeare and new writing. During this time, he began training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and then stayed in England due to marrying one of his classmates - still happy after all these years!
Working continuously in theatre for seven years after graduation, he also performed with the BBC Radio Drama Company before any screen work. In the mid 80's he was offered a major role in Stanley Kubrick's ‘Full Metal Jacket’ but passed on it for a lead in James Cameron's blockbuster debut ‘Aliens’ (1986) as Lt. Gorman for which he is best known. The next ten years saw him regularly playing leading roles in major regional, touring and West End theatre companies, while working more often in front of cameras.
His career to date includes over 120 art and indie films, mainstream international TV shows and numerous major Hollywood movies. William has recorded 100’s of audiobooks while other voice work includes cartoons, video games and international radio drama. A recent notable success was Neil Gaiman’s epic novel The Sandman released in 2020 (Audible’s most successful audiobook to date) with a huge all-star cast in which William stars as the psychotic and very funny Dr. Destiny /John Dee in multiple episodes. He hugely enjoys working for Princeton Audio Books due to the quality and topical diversity of their catalogue.
As well as ‘The Good Enough Life’ (Avram Alpert) for Princeton, William’s most recent work is ‘The Son’ directed by Florian Zeller, starring Hugh Jackman, Anthony Hopkins and Laura Dern soon to be released in 2022.