The Hamptons

Speranza


The End of the Hamptons: Scenes from the Class Struggle in America's Paradise
Corey Dolgon

Sociologist Dolgon's take on the famous "second home" summer resort (and increasingly year-round home) on the eastern end of New York State's Long Island is that it is not simply

"an elite,
yet neurotic,
theme park for New York City's
movers and shakers".

It's also an area being transformed by newer migrants drawn by work but priced out of housing and social services—concerns that also affect local farmers, fishermen, blue-collar workers and the survivors of some long-settled Indian tribes.

Don't look for celebrity gossip, old-timers' reminiscences, landscape descriptions or juicy historical anecdotes here.

The book is mostly a "clip job," combining information culled from other sources, such as local papers or some of the many other books and magazine articles on the area, and there is little original research.

Land development is a theme, but the most interesting chapter concerns regional efforts—strongly but somewhat dubiously supported by the ever-growing "mover and shaker" element (which increasingly votes here instead of the city) and so far fruitless—to break away from neighboring Suffolk Country to form a new "Peconic County."

This involves issues of tax base, "affordable" housing and class, race and income differences that grow ever more acute.

Unfortunately, the information throughout is chaotically organized and puzzlingly repetitious. 23 b&w illus.


This superb book focuses on current controversies in the Hamptons.

Dolgon’s treatment of these issues is carefully researched, richly detailed, and original, and presented in a beautifully clear narrative.

-David Halle,Contemporary Sociology


Takes us beyond the much-romanticized beaches of Long Island to the rich entrepreneurs and their McMansions, the 'furrin' workers, and the stubborn indigenous residents refusing to disappear.

The book is important because it is in so many ways a microcosm of the nation.”:
- Howard Zinn,author of A People's History of the United States



“Delicious and intellectually nutritious as a Montauk seafood fiesta.

Sharp and as jolting as the jitney journey from Manhattan, it is perfect beach reading, or enticing fodder for the downtime of long winters.”:
-Neil Smith,author of American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization



“Dolgon tells a history that is balanced and agenda-free.”:
-Foreword Magazine
,


“[A] very good book. It offers the reader an insightful political-economic analysis of eastern Long Island's microcosm of a class and ethnically divided society. . . .

This is a fascinating book for scholars interested in how all these factors play out in a fabled locality.”:
-Antipode, Susan S. Fainstein,Columbia University
About the Author

Corey Dolgon is associate professor of sociology at Worcester State College and the editor of Humanity and Society, the Journal of the Association for Humanist Sociology.