Shelved: Roundup of Book Posts September 2024

 

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

Perfidia.  James Ellroy.  Knopf, 2014.  720 pages.

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..  

Shelved: Roundup of Book Posts January 16 - 31, 2024

 

Devil In A Blue Dress Trailer 1995

Devil In A Blue Dress.  Walter Mosley.  W.W. Norton, 1990.  220 pages. Book 1 of 15 Easy Rawlins novels.

Walter Mosley has been one of the hottest names in crime fiction since at least the publication of the book in 1990, but I'm only now getting around to reading Devil, the first in his series of novels centered on Easy Rawlins.  Easy, the nickname of Ezekiel, is a Houston transplant to Los Angeles in 1948.  He's working and has bought a small house, living a life that attracted many black southerners to California during the Great Migration and WWII days.  Then, he loses his job and finds himself involved in a complicated mystery involving a powerful and wealthy man who has absolutely no qualms about using violence and hires Easy to look for a woman on the run.  She's on the run in LA's black neighborhood, where Easy would have easier access.  The story is a page-turner, and Easy Rawlins is a great character.  I will definitely be continuing his saga.

All That Is Wicked:  A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind.  Kate Winkler Dawson.  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022.  320 pages.

In the early 1870s, the people living in upstate New York were caught up in an extremely sensational true crime story;  Edward Ruloff was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the murder of a store clerk during a robbery.  It wasn't his first brush with the law.  Decades earlier, he had been charged and tried for the murders of his wife and baby and suspected of murdering his sister-in-law and her child.  Eventually, he served 10 years in New York's infamous Auburn Prison, famous for its strictly enforced solitary confinement and silence rules, after being convicted of kidnapping his wife, but not of her murder.

Ruloff was infamous for another reason.  He was considered by many to be an academic genius specializing in the study of classical languages, and he spent his life working on a manuscript outlining his earthshattering  and brilliant   (in his opinion) theory on the origins and evolution of language.  Acknowledged classical scholars read his theory and interviewed him.  Generally, they concluded that his theory was garbage, but he had an unrivaled knowledge of and talent for interpreting classical Greek and Latin texts.  

Ruloff was interviewed by scholars, reporters, and alienists - the 19th century forerunners of psychiatrists.  His case was iconic because it stimulated debate in the academic, medical, and legal worlds on three major questions?

1.  How can such a brilliant mind be so evil?

2.  Was Ruloff too evil to live?

3.  Would the destruction of such a brilliant mind be harmful to society?

The word psychopath didn't exist in Ruloff's time, but Dawson lays out the characteristics of psychopathy in her book and uses them, and comparisons to infamous 20th century psychopaths,  to prove Ruloff's condition, and the importance of his case in creating modern criminal psychiatry.  Even after his death, Ruloff was important because his story, and his brain itself, discredited faulty 19th century pseudoscience like phrenology and the racist idea that there were physical differences in the brains of the different races.

Overall, this was an interesting book, that is, until the last few pages when the author decided to do something I absolutely hate.  She was telling a perfectly good historical story, but then she couldn't resist throwing in biased political statement twisting and outright lies in order to prove that she is "on the right side of history."  That's not why I read the book, and it has no place.  

 

Sea People:  The Puzzle of Polynesia. Christina Thompson.  Harper, 2019.  384 pages.

The puzzle of Polynesia has existed for hundreds of years and is three-fold:  

1. Who are the people we call Polynesians?

2.  Where did they originate?

3.  How did they populate the Pacific?

From the initial contacts made by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries to the present, scholars, archaeologists, and anthropologists have tried to answer those questions.  Christina Thompson published this account of the puzzle and the various theories put forward over the years.  While linguistic, cultural, and physical characteristics indicate that Pacific Islanders share many commonalities, they are still a mystery.  As Thompson points out, a major impediment is the completely different mindsets of Pacific and European peoples.  Pacific Islander history is oral.  It is not literal, and it is non-sequential - there is no concept of dates or chronological order as Europeans see time.  Over the years, various theories have emerged about their origins, and the theorists have often shaped the oral stories to fit their particular theories.  One interesting theory that gained popularity in the 19th century was that Polynesians were "Aryans" - not THAT "Aryan"- originating in central Asia and migrating eastward before spreading across the ocean.  Now, 20th and 21st century anthropologists and archaeologists are making new discoveries that challenge previously held ideas.  

Thompson's book is an interesting and informative history of European contact with Pacific Islanders and the theories that have developed to solve the puzzle, and it hints at just how much more there is to learn.

Wish You Were Here:  Photos From The American South.   The Bitter Southerner, 2023. 256 pages.

The Bitter Southerner is one of my favorite online magazines.  There are always great stories by wonderful writers about the South and its past, present, and future.  These are stories about people, places, and things that make the South what it is.  Some of the stories are about things familiar to me, to one degree or another, and some are about things that I've never heard of or thought about.  They almost always make for good reading.

Great photos also accompany the great stories, and the editors have just released a collection of some of the best photos from the magazine's first 10 years, 2013 to 2023.  It's a beautiful book.  It was kind of jarring when I first opened it and found that there were no captions and no context at all, just page after page of photos.  (The credits and brief captions are listed at the end of the book, but they're still not "captions" by any definition.  They tell you nothing about the photos.)  Like I said, kind of jarring, but as I paged through I realized that it was the perfect showcase for the photos.  The viewer can appreciate the photos as the art that they are. A very few of the people photographed are recognizable; but the vast majority are just people going about their lives, making the patchwork quilt - or crazy quilt ? - that is the South.  It's a great collection.

Author Book Talk

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.  Casey Cep.  Knopf, 2019.  336 pages.  

In 1977, the Reverend Willie Maxwell was attending his step-daughter's funeral in rural Tallapoosa County Alabama when the girl's uncle pulled a gun out and shot him dead.  Reverend Maxwell had become a well known figure in eastern Alabama over the previous decade.  He first built a reputation as a handsome, well-dressed man who was often called upon to preach in country churches and at revivals throughout that part of his state.  Then, his wife was found murdered in her car on a dark road.  Over the next decade, other relatives of the minister died under mysterious circumstances, and, lo and behold, each one had a small life insurance policy in his/her name, with the beneficiary named, you guessed it, the Reverend Willie Maxwell.  Alabama investigators were sure that Maxwell was responsible, but they were unable to prove it.  Insurance companies fought claims, but they couldn't prove anything either.  Meanwhile, Maxwell's neighbors all knew what happened.  According to the rumor mill, Maxwell was not only a serial killer committing insurance fraud, but he was also a practitioner and priest of Hoodoo, the peculiar Alabama brand of spiritualism that blended Christianity, with African, Caribbean, and southern beliefs, rituals, and magic.  

Author Harper Lee grew interested in the story as it played out in court, and she decided that it would make a great subject for a book.  Unfortunately, that book was never published.  Casey Cep's book tells the story, but they're actually multiple stories in one, and each story is great.  There's the story of Maxwell and the murders, and his own murder.  Then, there's the story of Tom Radney, the progressive liberal white Alabama attorney and politician, who defended Maxwell throughout his legal troubles due to the deaths and the insurance claims and THEN defended the man who killed Maxwell. Finally, there's the life of Harper Lee, her personal and professional struggles, and her incredibly complex and interesting relationship with Truman Capote, the childhood friend whose most famous work, In Cold Blood, would probably not have been as successful - or even published, without her involvement.  All the stories make Furious Hours a great read.

 

Zarafa: A Giraffe's True Story From Deep In Africa to the Heart of Paris.  Michael Allin.  Walker Books, 1998.  224 pages.

I tend to avoid books, movies, and television shows that are centered on animals because, quite frankly, human beings are horrible and frightening creatures, and it seems like most animal stories have cruelty, suffering, and death at their center.  I can't stand that.  (And yet I read lots of dark human history. I just like animals more than people.)  However, I remembered hearing good things about Zarafa when it was published, and it's one of several books about the first "so-and-so" animal to arrive in "such and such"  place, usually Europe or the US.  These stories are interesting because, in each case, there's usually some cultural impact that surrounds the animal's arrival and makes for a good story.

Fortunately, Zarafa, the book, is not all cruelty.  There are a couple of pages about how animals like Zarafa were captured (The necessity of capturing them very young means slaughtering the mother, and for every animal successfully transported like Zarafa, several more die in the capture and transport.), and there are a few pages on the importation of animals by the Romans for slaughter in arenas, when thousands of animals may die for the pleasure of the crowds over the course of a few days. Aside from being ripped from her family unit and spending most of her life apart from her kind, Zarafa is fairly well taken care of.  Yeah, I know, "aside from all that."  It's bad, but not unreadable.

Anyway, the story begins in 1826 when Egypt's viceroy Muhammad Ali decides to gift French King Charles X with a giraffe, the first giraffe in France.  Following the French Revolution and Napoleon Wars, Europeans returned to Enlightenment ideals, and royals and wealthy individuals began to assemble new curiosity cabinets, museums, and menageries.  Collection fever was high.  Ali hoped to capitalize on that by currying favor with Charles with the gift of exotic animals.  Zarafa was captured, floated 2,000 miles on the Nile, crossed the Mediterranean, and then walked 550 miles from Marseilles to Paris.  She became an instant celebrity, drawing crowds, inspiring souvenirs and fashions, and stirring French imaginations.

Author Michael Allin paints a vivid picture of Ali's Egypt and of late 1820s France.

There are several children's books that tell the tale and a 2012 animated movie.