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Audiobook preview
Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History. Cody Cassidy. Penguin Books, 2020. 240 pages.
This was one of the most fun books that I've read in a while. It's very much aimed at a mass audience, and I listened to the audiobook version which was very podcast-like --- a really well done and thoroughly entertaining podcast, not the average podcasts with the clueless host, the breathless host, or the gigglebox host. Writer Cody Cassidy did his research and interviewed leaders in one of the fastest evolving (pun intended) fields of science there is, paleoanthropology, the study of prehistoric humankind. New discoveries and conclusions are being made in this field at an incredible pace, turning "established" theories on their heads. He asked them about firsts, who did certain things first and how did they impact the development of humanity. Who wore the first pants? Who painted the first masterpiece? Who first rode the horse? Who invented soap? Who invented the wheel? Who told the first joke? Who drank the first beer? Who was the murderer in the first murder mystery, who was the first surgeon, who sparked the first fire--and most critically, who was the first to brave the slimy, pale oyster?
Of course, no one could provide concrete answers like "Thag did it on June 21, 45,000 BC." What he does do is set up the context and describe the likely character and scenario and explain the invention, how it came about, and its significance. In the process, he really prompts the reader to think about prehistoric man in a totally new light. First, we have to drop the whole idea of prehistoric man being "primitive" and less intelligent. Just consider the vast knowledge that they had to know in order to survive and how helpless we would be in their world. Second, there are undeniable universalities across all human cultures that make us human and unite us over place and time. There were prehistoric geniuses, dullards, clowns, artists, wheelers and dealers, just like humans today. This was an eye-opening, edifying, and entertaining book.
Red Hook: Brooklyn Mafia, Ground Zero. Frank DiMatteo and Michael Benson. Citadel, 2024. 368 pages. (Advance Readers Copy: Official Sale date is November 26, 2024.)
Today, we know Brooklyn as the second largest borough of New York City, at 71 square miles, a vibrant, diverse home to artists and hipsters, but it was an independent city for 250 years before it was officially absorbed into New York in 1898. Around the turn of the 20th century, Brooklyn was known for two things: a busy port and lots of crime. It seemed men had two choices according to the authors, "You either worked the docks or you became a crook." There were as many as 79 juvenile street gangs, and many of the alumni graduated into harder crime. Irish and then Italian organized crime families came to dominate Brooklyn, with all of the big names involved, with nicknames like "Scarface," "The Mad Hatter," "Peg Leg," "Wild Bill," "Cigar," and "The Executioner." Over the 20th century, mob activities, turf wars, and hits were commonplace, and Brooklyn became "ground zero' for organized crime. That century of Brooklyn's history is well documented here by two bona fide mafia historians, one of whom is the son of a former Mafia bodyguard, and the other has published numerous books on the subject. This is a must-read for those interested in mob history.
Podcast on Willoughbyland
Willoughbyland: England's Lost Colony. Matthew Parker. Thomas Dunne Books, 2017. 313 pages.
Having recently read Keith Thomson's Paradise of the Damned, the account of Sir Walter Raleigh's obsession with the legends of El Dorado, the golden city of South America, this book popped up on my radar. Raleigh's stories and expeditions inspired many other English adventurers over the next several decades, including Sir Francis Willoughby. In 1650, Lord Willoughby, a royalist concieved a plan to colonize the land between the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers, present day Suriname, both as a refuge for fellow royalists escaping parliamentarian rule in England and as a profit-making venture. He recruited hundreds of settlers, including planters from Barbados and Jews who had earlier settled in Brazil. The colonists discovered a world beyond their dreams: vast tracks of thick jungle, an area of immense biodiversity including 800 tree species, 1,600 bird species, 300 species of catfish alone, and animals like anteaters, armadillos, caiman, and manatees. Even in 2013, an expedition documented thousands of species of animals, including 60 never before identified. By 1663, there were 1,000 white colonists successfully producing and exporting sugar and tobacco. They enjoyed a degree of religious tolerance found in few places in Europe at the time and were ruled by an assembly of planters that voted on proposals offered by the governor and executive council. The colony largely coexisted peacefully with their indigenous neighbors. Unfortunately, the economic success was built on the enslavement of Africans, and the Barbadian planters imposed their notoriously brutal form of slavery on the enslaved. The colony was captured by the Dutch during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, but it was nominally re-captured by the British a few months later. By that time, there wasn't much left of the colony, and Suriname was officially swapped for New Amsterdam (now New York City) in a treaty seven years later. Today, there is almost no trace of the colony, except for the descendants of those enslaved people, and the jungle has swallowed Willoughbyland.
Author talk
Are you a misanthrope at heart? Do you think humanity is innately evil and beyond redemption? Do you like long, overly complicated stories full of vile characters who speak in stilted and totally unrealistic dialogue? Do you like gritty, grimy, graphic, violent crime noir? with shocking levels of corruption, racism, and brutality? If so, you are probably familiar with the works of James Ellroy, or definitely should be. I've read some of his other works, but I somehow missed this book, which won numerous awards and has been called a "great Americal novel" by many reviewers and critics, until now.
The setting is Los Angeles in December 1941. The city is on edge well before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Pearl Harbor. The entire city police force and government is made up of greedy, corrupt, power-hungry, evil, hateful, racist, misogynistic men who have no qualms about committing rape, murder, theft, or any other crime on the books as long as it adds to their wealth and/or power. The Pearl Harbor attack leads to an explosion of sorruption and racism, like a gigantic pimple bursting and expelling oozing pus. Every character is tainted, including the alleged hero, Japanese-American police forensic specialist Hideo Ashida, as he attempts to solve the murders of a Japanese-American family in an all-white neighborhood. This puts him into conflict and collusion at various times with Sergeant Dudley Smith, a war profiteer and schemer extraordinaire, Captain Bill Parker, an alcoholic climber with designs on becoming the next Los Angeles police chief, and Kay Lake, a 21-year old adrenaline junkie who thrives on being at the center of the action. There are also real people as minor characters like J. Edgar Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, JFK, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Paul Robeson. Sure, it's graphic, violent, disturbing, totally politically incorrect, and disgusting, but I found it hard to put down.
Curator Talk on the exhibit at The Dali Museum
Reimagining Nature: Dali's Floral Fantasies. Salvador Dali Museum & Ludion, 2024. 108 pages. (Available online and in The Dali Museum gift shop)
One of the pleasures of living where we do is that we are an hour from The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, one of our favorite museums, and we quickly became members after moving. "Reimagining Nature" is a current exhibit (through October 27, 2024) of three suites of floral prints created by Salvador Dali between 1968 and 1972. The prints are a part of the museum's permanent collection, but they haven't been displayed together for 20 years. In order to create these prints, Dali took original 18th and 19th century botanical illustrations by masters of the genre and painted over them by juxtaposing surreal and incongruous elements and symbols that he often used throughout his career like flies, ants, melting clocks, and body parts. The prints are collected in this catalog, no texts, just beuatiful engaging prints..
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