Author Talk
Nature's Messenger: Mark Catesby and his Adventures in a New World. Patrick Dean. Pegasus Books, 2023. 320 pages.
In 1722, Mark Catesby arrived in Charles Town (Charleston), South Carolina. He came with a mission: to explore the colony and to document its native flora and fauna on behalf of a British audience that was hungry to learn about the exotic plants and animals of the New World. Over the next four years, he traveled throughout Virginia and the Carolinas, west to the mountains and south to the border of British America at the time, the Savannah River, and he also spent time in the Bahamas. He made extensive notes and drew lots of pictures. Along the way, he made observations of colonial life on the plantations and farms, and, unusually for a white man at the time, he also observed Native American and enslaved African cultures and, even more unusually, listened to and respected their knowledge of the natural world. He became the first professional natural historian to document what would become the southeastern United States. The book that he produced, The Natural History of Carolina, was groundbreaking and highly esteemed, the first ever illustrated account of American plants and animals published. His impact on the field of natural history was great; several plants and animals have his name in their scientific names, including the American bullfrog.
Patrick Dean tells Catesby's story, and he does an excellent job of describing the 18th century coffee house and royal society phenomena that fueled the huge interest in natural history. This book fits well with other books that I've read about early naturalists: Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, William Bartram's Travels, Painter in a Savage Land, and A Pirate of Exquisite Mind. Bartram partially followed Catesby's path a generation later; his father and Catesby had been correspondents. A century after Catesby, John James Audubon may have become more famous, but Catesby's legacy is huge. (One caveat: I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author. This was a mistake. Not all writers read well, and it sounds almost like a home recording.)
Author talk
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an Organized-Crime Boss. Margalit Fox. Random House, 2024. 336 pages.
When one hears the words "organized crime in New York," one naturally thinks of the gangster era of the 1920s and 1930s, when Italian, Jewish, and Irish mobsters competed to control the lucrative bootlegging, gambling, drugs, prostitution, and extortion rackets and went to actual war against rivals. Few, if any of us, would picture a 6 foot tall, 300 pound German Jewish immigrant peddler's wife, known as "Ma" or "Marm" Mandelbaum, but she was a towering - pun intended - figure in New York City in the last quarter of the 19th century. Fredericka Mandelbaum arrived in New York City in steerage and struggled alongside her street peddler husband to make a living before opening a shop. With the family living above the shop, she sold high end items, silk cloth, cashmere, jewelry, and luxurious furnishings and accessories, all at wholesale prices. Some of her customers were upper class, but most were from the rising middle class and those nouveau riche moving into the newly burgeoning Gilded Age upper class. What her customers didn't, or did know, was that everything she sold was stolen by highly trained and organized pickpockets, shoplifters, and burglars who scoured the city and surrounding area for goods to take back to "Marm," as they called her. She gave them a fair, fast payoff, made sure all identifying marks were removed, and then sold the items at about 60-65% of their value, still taking in a handsome profit. Not only was she the city's most successful and prosperous fence, but she selected, trained, and organized the criminals and planned their jobs, taking in hundreds of millions of dollars of stolen goods in today's dollars. Meanwhile, she entertained well-known and connected figures in government, business, and society at her dinner table and maintained a very protective network of policemen, lawyers, and judges. She became a neighborhood philanthropist, paying rent for some, usually wives of men arrested in her employ, and making donations to worthy causes and to her synagogue. Her world finally crumbled when she set her sight on banks, and one miscue after another led to her downfall. It's a great and too little-known rags to riches story. Margalit Fox's research is incredible, and it's not only the story of Mrs. Mandelbaum, but also a real history of crime and corruption in Gilded Age New York. I highly recommend it.
Orange Crush. Tim Dorsey. William Morrow, 2001. 304 pages. Book 3 of 26, Serge Storms series.
OK, you know I've become a huge fan of Tim Dorsey's wildly satirical series of Florida Man crime fiction relating the exploits of psychotic homicidal Florida-history-savant serial killer Serge Storms, and I'm working through the series. Orange Crush is book 3, and Serge is almost a secondary character. His druggie traveling companion Coleman is absent in this adventure, so Serge is on his own. And he's not even Serge for a large chunk of the book. He has amnesia and doesn't know who he is, so naturally he becomes a top aide and speechwriter for the Florida governor. In the middle of a hotly contested gubernatorial campaign, he accompanies the governor around the state on a quest to discover the true Florida. Mysteriously, dead bodies seem to pop up in their wake. The history is a little light in this entry compared to the other books in the other series. The focus is really on the hypocrisy, ridiculousness, sleaziness, stupidity, and pure evil that is politics, especially Florida politics. (I swear, Florida politicians make even Georgia politicians look better by comparison.) Still, it delivers the laughs, insights, and complex twists and storylines that I've come to expect from Serge.
author podcast appearance
Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom. McCracken Poston, Jr. Citadel, 2024. 320 pages.
This one is more of a real-life courtroom drama than history. It's a compelling story that fans of true-crime and mystery podcasts will really get into. It's got a mysterious death in a small town, a cast of eccentric characters, and a down-on-his-luck attorney/politician looking to turn his life around. It's 1997 in Ringgold, Georgia, just on the Georgia side of the state boundary with Tennessee. Alvin Ridley drives to a pay phone and calls authorities to tell them that his wife is dead. Everybody in town knew Alvin Ridley. He was Ringgold's version of the crazy man who is constantly in conflict with others; every small town and neighborhood has that weird character that everybody knows. People shunned and feared him. He lived in a constant state of paranoia, believing everyone conspired against him. Wife? Nobody knew he was even married. His wife hadn't been seen outside of their ramshackle home since 1970. McCracken Poston, Jr was a struggling attorney whose political career suffered a major setback. Their paths crossed, and Poston became Ridley's attorney, defending him against charges of murder and holding her against her will. Poston found himself at odds with his client as much as with the prosecutor. It is a really interesting story, and it's written really well. It has a tone very similar, in my opinion, to the writing of my favorite southern writer alive today, Rick Bragg.
Maria Mandl, YouTube documentary
Mistress of Life and Death: The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women's Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Susan J. Eischeid. Citadel, 2023. 464 pages.
"She was a nice girl from a good family." Maria Mandl was the last of four siblings born to a highly respected and successful shoemaker in a small Austrian village and a devoutly religious mother who suffered from depression and other illnesses throughout her life. Her father scrimped and saved to send Maria to a convent school, unlike her older sisters. There, she learned to play the piano and developed a great appreciation for and knowledge of music. When WWII began, Maria joined the new corps of women guards for German concentration camps. She quickly stood out. She was refined and educated compared to most of her colleagues who typically had little to no education and were often former criminals and prostitutes. She also surpassed them in sheer brutality and sadism, and she rose through the ranks quickly, eventually becoming the head women's overseer at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest death camp. Meanwhile, her parents were known for their staunch opposition to Nazism and for their kindness to all. Her father risked arrest by making anti-Nazi comments and by using leather scraps to make free shoes for village children during the war. Her mother went to church daily to pray for Maria's soul. They only had a vague idea of what she actually did in her job, and probably couldn't have imagined that she regularly, and without provocation, beat prisoners with whips, rubber clubs, and her fists, oversaw their torture and starvation, oversaw hideous medical experiments, demanded inspections in terrible weather - standing for 10 to 14 hours- which led directly to hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, ordering poison injections of pregnant women and infants, and personally leading children to the gas chambers after showering them with affection and treats for a few days. Oh, she also created the infamous Auschwitz women's orchestra which she forced to play as work details left and returned to camp and during some selections and arrivals of trains filled with the doomed. How can this happen? This book is an incredibly important addition to the history of the Holocaust.
Author talk
Mercury Pictures Presents. Anthony Marra. Hogarth, 2022. 432 pages.
Whew! This was a long one! It was an audiobook that we listened to together in the car, and it took a while, but it was worth it. If you're a fan of James McBride's big sweeping, slow-moving epics with lots of characters like Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, you will enjoy this book.
The central character is Maria Lagana. As a little girl in Rome, she developed a love of movies, bonding her with her father, an attorney whose principles made him an enemy of Mussolini's regime and led to his arrest. When she and her mother immigrate to the US, she begins to work for a small struggling studio called Mercury Pictures, and she quickly becomes the indispensable right hand of the quirky studio head, full of great ideas and able to get things done, but constrained by her gender. She begins a romance with a talented Chinese-American actor, himself constantly struggling to break through the racial barrier and become a leading man. Her family is adjusting to life in the new country, and the studio is full of interesting characters, each with his or her own unique backgrounds and issues. Many are refugees forced to leave their European homes. Then, one day a visitor from Italy, who had been imprisoned with her father, arrives, World War II begins, and their lives are all upended. I must admit that there were times when the book seems to drag and nothing much was happening, but there was lots of character development. I did become invested in the characters and their lives. It's very witty, and it paints a richly detailed picture of wartime Hollywood and the movie industry of the 1930s and 1940s. It's a good read.
Author talk
Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure. Donald and Petie Kladstrup. Broadway, 2001. 304 pages.
I am the farthest thing from an oenophile, a wine connoisseur. In fact, I really don't even like wine, and I really can't discern one from another. However, a friend shared this book on social media, and I was intrigued. I ended up thoroughly enjoying it and learning from it. As the authors write in the preface, "It is not a book about wine or a book about war, but a book about people." Specifically, it's about the French and the role of wine in French culture, especially during World War II.
We all know the stories of the looting and pillaging of real and cultural treasures that took place across Europe as the Germans stormed through the continent, stealing jewels, antiques, art masterpieces, and other valuables from palaces, museums, and private owners, but, before reading this book, I had never even thought of the German occupation's effect on France's wine industry and how all of French society was shaken as a result. Hundreds of millions of bottles of wine were stolen or destroyed during the war, from small, insignificant family vineyards and from huge operations that had built world renowned reputations over centuries. Some bottles were stolen and drunk by German troops, many more were shipped directly to high-ranking Nazi leaders like Goerring and Goebbels. (Debate continues on the question of Hitler's taste for wine, with some saying he was a teetotaler, not even drinking wine, and some saying he drank some but wasn't a huge fan.) German authorities required that all other French-produced wine be sold to German agents only. A special group of German officers was even recruited to oversee this operation. Called "Vine Fuhrers" by the French, they were usually German winemakers themselves. As this book relates, not all of the production made it to Germany, however. The authors focus on 5 prominent winemaking families of different regions and the measures that they took to protect their prized vintages from German hands. There was deception, subterfuge, even collaboration with the French Underground to blow up or waylay trains carrying wine. The stories are very interesting, and this book is a great history of occupied France.
Author/Subject interview
In the Ghost Shadows: The Untold Story of Chinatown's Most Powerful Crime Boss. Peter Chin and Everett De Morier. Citadel, January 21, 2025. 208 pages. Advance Readers Copy.
Organized crime of a different complexion: Chinatown, 1970s and 1980s. New York's Chinatown was its own world. English was not necessary. Every business owner paid protection money to one of the gangs that controlled the neighborhood, and failure to pay brought serious consequences. The most powerful crime boss, the man who ruled Chinatown at the time, was Peter Chin. Chin's story is a twisted American immigrant success story, a real rags to riches story. He spent his early childhood in a one-room concrete block house in China with his mother and sisters, and then the family immigrated to New York. Peter was enrolled in school, but, in those days, children who couldn't speak English were passed along without ever learning it, so his "schooling" ended at an early age. His mother worked in a sweatshop, and he and his siblings had to work alongside her so that she met the outrageous demands of the job. His father, whom he met at age 8, ignored and neglected the family, except to beat Peter, and then the rest of the family when Peter fled at 12 or 13. Peter found a new family, the Ghost Shadows, one of the second tier gangs. He quickly rose through the ranks to boss, making the Ghost Shadows more powerful, until busted and serving 20 years under the RICO racketeering act. After his release, he kept a low profile and became a successful legal businessman, but he refused to talk about his gangster life, until now. It's a unique look into the inner workings of Chinatown crime gangs and Chin's rise and fall, straight from the horse's mouth.
Triggerfish Twist. Tim Dorsey. William Morrow, 2002. 320 pages. Book 4 of 26, Serge Storms series.
Florida's favorite psychopathic serial killer with a super-eidetic memory continues his adventures in this fourth entry of Tim Dorsey's brilliantly satirical series. In this one, Serge basically sets up a home base in a once-quiet neighborhood of Tampa, and Florida history is a bit light compared to other titles, but anyone at all familiar with Tampa will recognize references on almost every page. Readers learn a bit more about Serge's childhood and adolescence, and he is reunited with his traveling partner, Coleman, the drug savant. In addition to the expected expansion of the "Florida Man" trope, Dorsey skewers car dealers, corporations, education, Florida seniors, business consultants, and law enforcement. It's another fun entry.
The Pope of Palm Beach. Tim Dorsey. William Morrow, 2018. 352 pages. Book 21 of 26, Serge Storms series.
Serge Storms, Florida history's biggest cheerleader who just happens to be a psychotic, serial-killing vigilante, is traveling around the state with his best friend Coleman on another leg of his literary history tour of the state, visiting sites important in the lives of real Florida authors. In this installment, they meet one of Serge's favorites, a fictitious writer who became a paranoid recluse following the murder of his best friend, Darby Pope, the great and beloved surfer king of Palm Beach. The Pope was a major part of Serge's childhood, and the book alternates between the present day and flashbacks to that past. Of course, cartels, mobsters, drug smugglers, and others, including drunken frat boys, are all involved, and Serge is forced to take action to save his friends, and sea turtles, from catastrophe.
An Animated Summary Trailer for 1999 movie version
Breakfast of Champions. Kurt Vonnegut. Delacorte Press, 1973. 303 pages.
A classic. I went through a Kurt Vonnegut phase in high school. (Thanks, again, to my English teachers who turned me on to reading authors who were not typically taught in small south Georgia towns, like Vonnegut, John Updike, John Irving, and John Kennedy Toole, and opened up my mind.) I read all the Vonneguts in the public library. (Again, surprisingly well-stocked.) Did I understand what I was reading? Maybe not. Do I understand it now, forty years later? Maybe not. But I like what it does to my brain.
In The Pope of Palm Beach, Tim Dorsey has one of his characters recommend reading Breakfast as the gateway to Vonnegut, so I thought I'd go back to it, and there are only a handful of books I've ever re-read. Super-Bonus: I listened to the audiobook version, read by John Malkovich. Breakfast is a wild ride, a satire of as many -isms as one can stuff into 300 pages: racism, consumerism, capitalism and sex, politics, publishing, pornography, religion, and pollution. It's the story of two men, prolific sci-fi author Kilgore Trout and mid-west businessman Dewayne Hoover, and their ill-fated and life-changing meeting, and the events leading up to it. It's also very "meta." The narrator seems to be Vonnegut himself, and he reveals autobiographical details and interacts with his characters throughout the book. One of the major themes of the book is free will, and Vonnegut plays with the idea of himself as the creator of his world, within the world created by "The Creator" of the universe. Many of his characters from other novels make appearances as well. It's like a Vonnegut Universe. I'm glad that i did this re-read and may dive back in to other Vonneguts. It's also great fun to see that Tim Dorsey's work was so greatly influenced by Vonnegut. It's all there: the wild characters, the outrageous situations, the chaos, the humor, the satire. Dorsey is/was a more fun and more accessible Vonnegut.
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