Author podcast appearance
The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne. Kate Winkler Dawson. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025. 320 pages.
Kate Winkler Dawson has made a name for herself as a true-crime author and podcaster, and her newly published book is a great one. It's a great topic, a story-behind-the-story, a whodunnit, a true crime story, a story-that-inspired-a great-story story. On December 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead, hanging, on a small New England family farm. Sarah was a mill girl. Like many other single girls in New England, she had been drawn to the textile mills and long, hard work days, far from their families. Her life was difficult, and she struggled. She found solace in Methodist churches and meetings. The Methodists were a relatively new denomination, and the established Congregationalists looked down on them, aghast at their fervent - in their eyes, frenzied and wild - worship style and their loud, frantic, "hell-fire and damnation" style of preaching that didn't require formal education. In their eyes, Methodists were drunk, ignorant, promiscuous, and criminal, blasphemers Traditional, staid New Englanders also tended to look down on mill girls in general, often considering them wanton women, challenging societal mores. Sarah's death stirred up a lot of controversy, especially after it was discovered that she was pregnant. Questions arose. Was it murder or suicide? Who was the baby's father? As to the latter question, evidence soon pointed to a local, married Methodist minister named Ephraim Avery. Was he also a murderer? A noted author of the time, Catherine Read Williams, immediately began investigating and published her own book about the case in 1833, perhaps the first true crime book in American history. The case, and Williams' book inspired another book that you may have heard of, a little novel called The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nearly two hundred years later, Dawson takes up the investigation, using Williams work, her own research, and modern forensics and experts to answer the questions and determine the truth, successfully weaving the stories of Sarah, Hawthorne, and Williams together.
CBS Sunday Morning interview
Cher: Part One: The Memoir. Cher. Dey Street Books, 2024. 432 pages.
Cher is the Icon of all Icons. Before Chappell Roan, there was Gaga. Before Gaga, there was Madonna. Before Madonna, there was Cher. And she's bigger than all of them. Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only artist to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center. It's hard to name another entertainer whose life has been filled with re-inventions and rebirths. Now, she's telling her story.
And what a story it is. Her family's history and her childhood were chaotic, to put it mildly. The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road look like happy fairy tales by comparison. It becomes even more surreal (Speaking of surrealism, the later story about Sonny and Cher meeting Salvador Dali is one of my favorite anecdotes in the book.) when she adds stories about playing with Dean Martin's children and Liza Minnelli. Part one covers her childhood through the 1970s, focusing, of course, on her marriage and partnership with Sonny Bono and their rise to stardom, and their divorce. It ends with her divorce from Greg Allman and with Cher on the verge of launching her acting career. Cher's always been known for her honesty, openness, and humor. She pulls no punches here, and I'm looking forward to part two.
Tom Jones with Little Richard on "This Is Tom Jones!", 1969
Tom Jones: Over the Top and Back. Tom Jones. Michael Joseph, 2015. 400 pages.
Like Cher, Tom Jones is an icon with a long and legendary career stretching over decades, with massive roller coaster ups and downs, and both have reinvented themselves and demonstrated the willingness to grow and adapt. In 2015, he published his autobiography, and, like Cher's, it's a winner. The stories are incredibly entertaining, and honestly told. Unlike Cher, Tom concentrates mostly on his music and his career, not as much on his personal life and his marriage, and he never even alludes to the stories of thousands of sexual partners while on the road. However, it's a great story told by a great entertainer who is still going strong. We saw him live in concert a couple of times in his late 70s and were blown away, and, last week, I just purchased tickets to see the 84-year old in concert in May. (Note: I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by the great actor Jonathan Pryce. Pryce does a spectacular impression of Jones.)
Author Talk
From Saloons to Steakhouses: A History of Tampa. Andrew T. Huse. University Press of Florida, 2024. 338 pages.
This is, hands down, the best history of Tampa and one of the best histories of Florida that I've read so far. What's not to like when an author combines food and history? Modern Tampa was founded in 1887, a rough and wild frontier town. Yes, people often forget, or were never aware, that the bulk of non-indigenous settlement of Florida took place late in the19th century, and "pioneers" were moving into the state and carving out homesteads well into the first quarter of the 20th century. Tampa was a frontier town, drawing homesteaders and cowboys, before it was discovered by developers, and then really started booming when it became of the headquarters of US military forces during the Spanish-American War and cigar factories started attracting Cuban, Spanish, and Italian workers. It was a wild and crazy place that was, if not totally lawless, at least law-challenged. Saloons, bars, gambling halls, and theatres sprung up for entertainment. There was lots of money to be made, especially for the proprietors of these establishments and for the politicians and lawmen that they paid to look out for their interests. Huse uses newspaper stories and firsthand accounts to tell the city's story over the century, describing "temperance advocates who crusaded against saloons and breweries, cigar workers on strike who depended on soup houses for survival, and civil rights activists who staged sit-ins at lunch counters. These stories are set amid themes such as the emergence of Tampa’s criminal underworld, the rise of anti-German fear during World War I, and the heady power of prosperity and tourism in the 1950s." (from Amazon blurb) It is thoroughly entertaining and enlightening.
Steve Berry discussing the creation of Cotton Malone
The Alexandria Link. Steve Berry. Ballantine Books, 2007. 480 pages. Book 2 of 19 in Cotton Malone series.
Cotton Malone returns in his second outing as a retired elite special agent from Atlanta turned rare book dealer in Copenhagen. This time, his son is kidnapped, and his Copenhagen shop is burned to the ground by a shadowy group of millionaires and billionaires whose aim is to force him into finding the famed Library of Alexandria, thought to have been destroyed 1500 years ago. Their goal is to find historical evidence housed there that would ultimately upend the entire Middle East, destroy the very foundations of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and possibly cause World War III. Cotton and his ex-wife have to work together to find and free their son and solve the mystery, while his former boss in the States finds herself embroiled in a deadly conspiracy that literally reaches the highest levels of the US government as she tries to help Cotton.
The Cotton Malone series is fast-paced action based on real historical fact and mystery, creatively embellished by the author, and it will definitely appeal to readers of political thrillers. There seem to be certain tropes present in Steve Berry books like globe-trotting, secret code deciphering, multiple betrayals, mysterious secret societies, and, for some reason, shootouts in churches and historical buildings. They're good adventure stories that will appeal to history buffs. They're good adventure stories that will appeal to history buffs. These first two entries both deal with biblical mysteries, New Testament in the first and Old Testament in the second. (And they're better than later Dan Brown books in my opinion.)
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