An evocative and wildly absorbing novel about the Winters, a family living in New York City’s famed Dakota apartment building in the year leading up to John Lennon’s assassination
It’s the fall of 1979 in New York City when twenty-three-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton’s father, the … Dakota. Anton’s father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from a breakdown. Before long, Anton is swept up in an effort to reignite Buddy’s stalled career, a mission that takes him from the gritty streets of New York, to the slopes of the Lake Placid Olympics, to the Hollywood Hills, to the blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and brings him into close quarters with the likes of Johnny Carson, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and a seagoing John Lennon.
But the more Anton finds himself enmeshed in his father’s professional and spiritual reinvention, the more he questions his own path, and fissures in the Winter family begin to threaten their close bond. By turns hilarious and poignant, The Dakota Winters is a family saga, a page-turning social novel, and a tale of a critical moment in the history of New York City and the country at large.
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The Dakota Winters is deft, funny, touching, and sharply observed, a marvel of tone, and a skillful evocation of a dark passage in the history of New York City, when all the fearful ironies of the world we live in now first came stalking into view.
Thoughtful and entertaining…A thought-provoking time capsule… If you were a fan of TV’s Mad Men — specific to a time and place but universal in its exploration of the themes of identity and human vulnerability — you might very well love this novel as much as I did.
Seamlessly mingling historical figures with invented ones, Tom Barbash conjures a gritty, populous, affectionate portrait of 1979 New York City: the site of his subtly captivating paean to filial love.
Terrific. Slice o life in the Dakota, nice NY story.. No flies on this book.
I have always been obsessed with the Dakota and read any book about or with the Dakota as a character. This book didn’t disappoint.
The Characters were wonderful and plot a little unbelievable, but after all-it was fiction.
Enjoyed the ideas presented in the story.
Fascination narrative. Great NY stories of interesting characters and iconic places. Very engaging.
Inventive story line and a relaxing book to read.
The first half to two-thirds were good, but then the language and the events disintegrated.
Loved this book. It was a throwback to a time I remember as a New Yorker. Love, love, loved it. I didn’t want it to end. I wanted more!
Loved this book!
This is mostly a tribute to John Lennon. If that doesn’t interest you, don’t waste your time with this book.
Sweeps through the late ’70’s world of talk shows and celebrity entertainment from the point of view of a 22-year-old who learns to understand himself as he helps his late-night-host father come back after an on-air breakdown. Great pacing and loads of detail bring the story to life. A great read!
About real people. Buddy and his son Anton have a complex loving relationship. A love song to real relationships…..even John Lennon’s! A loving look at NYC and the people who live there as if it were a village!
You gotta love this book because…New York. Because John Lennon. Because the Dakota. Because the narrator Anton Winter. He’s so likable, and he’s up for any going anywhere with anybody. He finds his way to interesting places, gathering fascinating tidbits about the glitterati of NY. As the haunted and haunting building in front of which John Lennon was killed, the Dakota remains an icon of the 1980s when life was a little less corporate and creative people could cut through the noise to make their mark without social media and the need to be accessible 24/7. A lovely, nostalgic book.
The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash
The Dakota Winters is a must-read for anyone who wants to relive the exciting years of New York City in the 1970s, and specifically the lives of the Winter family in the Dakota Apartment building on Manhattan’s West Side. For everyone else not so much.
The novel, by Tom Barbash, is a coming of age tale about Anton Winter and his love/hate relationship with his father, Buddy Winters. Buddy was a well-regarded late-night TV talk show host early in the 1970s who had an on-air meltdown and walked off the set and from his family. He stayed away for a prolonged period while Anton was growing up a source of resentment for him. Although Anton was only a schoolboy, he had been Buddy’s unofficial personal assistant and producer. The family, including mother older sister and younger, tennis star, brother, lives in the famous Dakota Apartment building, a residence well stocked with other celebrities, including John Lennon of Beatles fame.
With that as background, the story opens with Anton, recovering from a life-threatening bout of malaria, contracted in Africa while serving in the Peace Corp, and Buddy, returned to family and mental health, and wanting a show biz comeback. With little happening, they hang out a lot together, going to movies, museums and restaurants, and the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid with other family members.
When Buddy gets another shot as a talk show host, he enlists Anton again to be his wingman. Anton is a little more ambivalent about his role this time around, but his siblings, friends and Buddy’s friends, including Lennon, urge him to reenlist. Anton and Lennon have an epic sailing adventure from New England to Bermuda during which Lennon starts writing music again and Anton ponders his future in between bouts of seasickness.
All of this happens at a leisurely pace, but if you’re an NYC fan, you won’t care because the name, event, and place name-dropping is almost nonstop, and very well done. You feel you are there with the rich and famous, and quickly forget you’re reading fiction.
Spoiler Alert! A deranged fan outside the Dakota shots John Lennon. But you already knew that, didn’t you.
To me, the characters lack personality and motivation. It’s like déjà vu all over again, with Buddy and Anton trying to reproduce their past relationship in a changed world. Nevertheless, you have to like the way Barbash tells the story. He’s a pro, firmly in command of his material, and you want to cut him a lot of slack because of all the people and places that regularly populate Anton and Buddy’s world.
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A crazily charming novel — and a reminder that charm can be a profound literary value. I wanted to begin a new life… with these characters. I wanted to trade worlds with them…A wise and seductive story that feels truer than true, as only the very finest fiction does.