Anne Perry. Blood on the Water. © 2014
This is the author’s 20th book featuring William Monk. If the others are all as good as this one, I
may read them all. It’s the 1860s, the
French are digging the Suez Canal and the British are trying to stop it. Monk is chief of the Thames river police and
happens to be on the water when the Princess
Mary, a large pleasure craft passes.
He sees a man jump overboard and a few seconds later there is an
explosion which blows off the whole bow and the ship sinks in about 4 minutes
with a loss of life later calculated at 179.
After rescuing as many survivors as he could, Monk immediately begins
his investigation, including an exploration of the wreck in a diving suit. The case is taken away from him and given to
the city police, who know nothing about the river. A case is made against an Egyptian man; he is
tried, convicted and sentenced to hang.
Monk is not satisfied and continues to investigate until his boat is
rammed and sinks and he nearly drowns.
He got a glimpse of the seahorse painted on the ramming boat’s stern and
then recalls seeing that same seahorse on a boat which picked up a survivor
from the Princess Mary and then
disappeared. The case is given back to
Monk and the river police and they soon find the boat and its Egyptian
owner. There’s another trial and we
readers get to experience combat between two barristers, those peculiar English
advocates who may argue a case for a defendant one day and prosecute a
different case the next. The problem is
to prove motive. Was this Egyptian
revenge against the British or a monstrous way to conceal the murder of one
person by making him or her one of many victims? Monk’s wife Hester, formerly a nurse in the
Crimea with Florence Nightingale, investigates and finds the answer and then
comes the surprise ending. August 2015
.
David McCullough. The Johnstown Flood. © 1968
This was McCullough’s first book.
According to Wiki, “The flood occurred on May 31, 1889, after the catastrophic
failure of the South Fork Dam on the Little
Conemaugh River 14 miles upstream of the town of Johnstown,
Pennsylvania. The dam broke after several days of
extremely heavy rainfall, unleashing 20 million tons of water (18 million cubic
meters) from the reservoir known as Lake Conemaugh. With a flow rate that temporarily equaled that of the Mississippi River, the flood killed 2,209 people and caused
US$17 million of damage (about $425 million in 2012 dollars).” According to local residents, the rain that
preceded the break in the dam was the heaviest ever experienced in the
valley. The first time I started this
book I thought it was too detailed and could have moved along faster. I’m glad I went back to it, because one of
the main points of interest is exactly that detail which McCullough was able to
compile from the reports of literally hundreds of journalists, public officials
and the reminiscences of the survivors.
This may have been the best documented event in US history up to that
time. Clara Barton showed up with lots
of nurses and stayed five months. This
really established the Red Cross as the major player in disaster relief in this
country. The story that only dribbled
out was that of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club which owned the dam.
Club members were rich people from Pittsburg, including Andrew Carnegie,
and they did not mix with the locals.
When they bought the dam from the Pennsylvania RR, it was in poor shape
and the club’s restoration was a haphazard affair which any engineer could have
told them was unsound and some did – in writing. Just about everyone thought the dam would eventually
break and then it did. The rich guys
from Pittsburg took no responsibility for the tragedy, although Carnegie did
rebuild his library. If this had
happened today, the guys from Pittsburg would be paying for the damage and
paying compensation to the survivors.
August 2015
.
Donald L. Miller. Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave
Birth to Modern America. © 2014
It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a book as much as I enjoyed this
one, so much that I may read it again in a year or so. In college I majored in history, and I have
been reading history off and on for the last 60 years. Most of what I have read stressed political
and military events with a sprinkling of economic activity as a sort of
seasoning. I did read some economic
history while I was in graduate school, and I have a shelf of things I meant to
read. This book is different. I’m not sure if I should call it meta history
or micro history. It is a collection of
short biographies of movers and shakers in Manhattan in the 1920s woven
together to create a comprehensive history of the city and how it affected
almost every aspect of our lives. Almost
all of the names were familiar to me, but I confess I knew little about
them. My impression of the 1920s was
that it was an era when people drank too much, partied too much and invested
recklessly, but that it was insignificant when compared with the progressive
era, the New Deal, the two world wars and the civil rights era. I was misinformed. What follows are some notes of things I don’t
want to forget.
Mayor
Jimmy Walker wanted a career writing musical comedies but ended up in politics. He was incredibly popular with the public, a gifted
speaker, a master of ceremony, a bon vivant and a good mayor who started a
number of projects and pushed through some significant reforms until he was
brought down by corruption and forced to resign.
I
knew the name Frank Costello, but I didn’t know he had a partner named Bill
Dwyer. Their chapter takes the reader
through some of their ingenious bootlegging operations and names a few other
bad guys like Owen Madden and wannabe bad guy George Raft and everyone’s friend
Mae West. Madden was the model for Damon
Runyon’s Dave the Dude. From his early
teen years Madden was involved in organized crime and had become an important
figure by 1912 when he survived an attack by another gangster in which he
received 11 bullet wounds. In 1923
Madden bought the Club Delux from boxer Jack Johnson and turned it into the
Cotton Club, which later became a vehicle for Duke Ellington. Madden avoided publicity and once gave Walter
Winchell a Stutz Bearcat to keep his name out of the papers. Madden had to leave New York in 1935 and
became the sage of Hot Springs and advisor to gangsters still in the business,
including Meyer Lansky. Another famous
entertainment venue was the 300 Club on 54th Street created by
singer and former chorus girl Texas Guinan.
She served up 40 burlesque dancers, lots of booze and her own singing
for the likes of Clara bow, Rudolph Valentino, Irving Berlin, Gloria Swanson
along with some Chryslers, Vanderbilts, Whitneys and the like. George Gershwin sometimes played her
piano.
There were entrepreneurs too. Miller tells the parallel stories of
Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein, both of whom came for nowhere and built
cosmetic empires that changed the female face of America. From there he moves on to Fred F. French, who
was the first to sell stock in real estate to ordinary people. He was not listed on Wall Street, but he had
150 well trained salesmen that enabled him to amass the capital to build Tudor
Village and a whole forest of setback high rises in Manhattan. For construction he needed steel
workers. Many of the first workers were
men who had worked aloft on square rigged sailing ships. Then builders discovered the Mohawks from
Canada who had gotten their start working on new bridges over the St. Lawrence.
There’s a complete description of the
teams that heated the rivets, threw them to a catcher with a bucket -- sometimes 60 feet up and away – and the
coordination it took to fit the rivet in place and flatten the end. In 1925 film producer Herbert Lubin conceived
the idea of building the world’s largest and finest motion picture
theater. To get the job done right, he
hired Samuel L. Rothafel, aka Roxy, at a high salary and promised him naming
rights. Roxy named the 5290 seat theater
the Roxy and made it a smashing success with programs that combined stage shows
and movies. It was hurt badly by the
stock market crash and its aftermath. In
1932, after developing several other theaters, Roxy moved on to open and manage
Radio City Music Hall. His previous
employer objected to his frequent, costly phone calls to race tracks.
Why were there so many Jews in the movie
industry? Because it was new and there
were few ethnic barriers.
In 1922 broadcast on radio of variety
shows at the Capitol Theater converted radio from communication to
entertainment. In 1915 David Sarnoff,
who had started with the Marconi Company and then moved to RCA, already
conceived of broadcast radio as a medium for entertainment and for mass
marketing of “radio music boxes.”
Westinghouse had the first regular broadcast entertainment on KDCA in
Pittsburg with a program from Frank Conrad’s garage. The commercials were to sell Westinghouse
radios, the same business plan conceived by Sarnoff for RCA in 1915. It was Sarnoff who invented network
broadcasting. Initially he used AT&T
telephone wires. Sarnoff overemphasized
classical music in his broadcast schedules on NBC until William Paley came
along and livened things up with entertainment programs on a new rival network
which became CBS. The comedians that I
remember from the 1940s and 1950s were the catalyst that created radio’s
popularity in the 1920s and 1930s: Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Fanny
Bryce, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Charlie Chaplin, Will Rogers, Abbot and
Costello, the Marx Brothers and many others.
Joseph Patterson, scion of The Chicago Tribune, came to NY and
founded the first tabloid, The Daily News.
The emphasis was on sensation and the
medium was as much pictures as it was words.
The Daily News brought in a Tribune photographer named Tom Howard,
who managed to get a picture of Ruth Snyder’s execution in the electric chair
at Sing Sing with a camera strapped to his ankle. The Daily News was a
leader in another technique for building circulation. Its sports writers developed close and
mutually profitable relationships with premier athletes like Babe Ruth, Lou
Gehrig and Jack Dempsey. This gives the
author an opening to give us some shortsport biographies.
For Ruth, it was a combination of his incredible eyesight, his
innovative full swing at the ball and a new manufacturing process for baseballs
that tightened their winding and made them livelier. He doesn’t pass over Ruth’s eating, drinking
and infidelities. Gehrig was a really
nice guy who became a great hitter by imitating the Babe’s swing. There’s a full treatment of Jack Dempsey’s
career and his relationship with manager Jack Kearns. The best story is Dempsey’s last two
knockouts in the 1960s. He was in a cab
in NY when two guys opened his door and tried to rob him. He took one out with his right and the other
with his left.
There’s a lot about architecture and
engineering. The best three stories are
about the construction of the Holland Tunnel, the Chrysler Building and the
George Washington Bridge. There’s a
section on the clothing industry and how it moved uptown along 7th
avenue as it evolved from manufacturing to high couture. There’s also a lot on the development of the
publishing industry in NYC. I was
intrigued by the passage on Horace Liveright, publisher and producer of
Broadway plays. He founded the Modern
Library and published the works of Theodore Dreiser, T.S.Eliot, Hemingway,
Pound and Faulkner.
Ponder this: ‘NYC is the capital of
lunch.” August 2015
.
Richard Powers. Orfeo. © 2014
Peter Els is 70 and retired from
teaching music composition. He was
originally trained as a microbiologist and is now experimenting in retirement
with bacteria to see if he can use them to encode music. The local police get a look at his home
laboratory and call Homeland Security on the presumption that he’s a
terrorist. They seize all his gear and
tell him not to leave town. He takes
off, of course. Then we get his life
story in flashbacks. He spent most of
his life trying to make it as an avant garde composer. His music, if it was music at all, was way
way out there. Some of it was heard in
New York, but it never caught on. His
adjunct professorship late in life was the alternative to continuing his life
in a cabin in the woods. Els saw music
in everything, and perhaps I understood some of what was said in his
conversations with colleagues and students and in his internal dialogs. Then there is the chase which ends in a
nursing home in Arizona where he has a last meeting with the producer and
director with whom he had worked off and on since college. Apparently all of Power’s novels are laced with
scientific and scholarly themes, like artificial intelligence in Galatea 2.2, game theory in Prisoner’s Dilemma and musicology cum
genetic recombination in The Gold Bug Variations. The review in the NYT by Jim Holt on
January 10, 2014 is one of the best I
have ever read. He notes: “(Powers) has every gift, it is sometimes implied, but the
gift of literature.” He goes on to talk
about how music is worked
into the structure of the novel. It’s
worth a look. The link is below. August
2015
.
Ray Suarez.
Latino Americans, The 500-Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation. © 2013
Suarez draws together the various strands of Hispanic American history
and leaves the reader somewhat awestruck at the effects Latin Americans have
had on our history and the much greater role they are likely to play in the
future, partly by sheer force of
numbers. There are the Cubans, the
Puerto Ricans, the Hispanics who occupied the southwest and California long
before Anglos got there, and the waves of immigrant workers, who have come
since we owned those territories. (He
could have mentioned that Santa Fe, founded in 1608, is the second oldest
permanent settlement in the US). The
most impressive immigrant story is that of Guy Galbadon, who moved in with a
Japanese American family when he was 12 and learned the language and Japanese
customs. On Saipan and Tinian, he single-handedly
captured 1500 Japanese soldiers, 10 times more than Medal of Honor winner Sgt.
York in WW I. His captain recommended
him for the Medal of Honor. He was
awarded the Silver Star. Suarez doesn’t
say where Galbdon’s Japanese family was during the war, but I think we can
presume they were in an internment camp in the desert. The saddest story is that of the Hispanic
American soldier who did win a Medal of Honor.
While in uniform he was refused service at a soda fountain in Texas. August 2015
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