Tucked away in the northwestern corner of Bergen County, Oakland was for years a peacefully undiscovered outpost. Yet as Kevin Heffernan chronicles in A History of Oakland, the town’s placid, easygoing character belies a fascinating and deeply engrossing history. From the interactions between the earliest Dutch settlers and the area’s Lenape Indians, to the surprising pro-slavery attitudes of mid-nineteenth-century northern New Jersey, to the radical–and, to some, wrenching–changes wrought by late twentieth-century commercial development, Heffernan provides a definitive account of the life and times of this once-sleepy town.