Books: Great Carnival

SODOM BY THE SEA—Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson—Doubleday, Doran ($3).

Coney Island was not always the garish proletarian mecca it is today. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Sam Houston, other aristocrats disported themselves on its then remote plage. Walt Whitman too was crazy about it: "The long bare unfrequented shore ... I had all to myself . . . where I loved after bathing to race up and down."

But in 1847 a little side-wheel steamer began to take trippers to Coney from Manhattan at 50¢ a head. Later came horsecars, and...