Important anniversaries

This weekend is Labor Day. In the Florida Keys that usually means some commemoration of one of the strongest hurricanes to hit the continental United States -- the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. It swept across Islamorada in the Upper Keys and killed an estimated 408 people, many of them World War I vets working on a New Deal relief program to build a highway in the Keys. It also destroyed the Overseas Railway, Henry Flagler's final achievement, which connected the Keys to the mainland for good. The railroad was not financially worth rebuilding; much of the roadbed and most of the magnificent bridges were converted for use in the Overseas Highway. You can see a lot of them today, alongside the replacement bridges that were built in the 1970s and '80s. Why is this a topic for a book blog? For one thing, I have written many times about the railroad and interviewed survivors, for an oral history series I wrote for the Miami Herald in the 1990s and an oral history compilation I put together for the Herald's late, lamented Tropic Magazine. But more currently, my current employer the Monroe County Public Library has just posted more than 700 images related to the railroad to our Flickr account, and these images (including the one above) are something to see. Historian Tom Hambright wrote a blog post about the images and the railroad for our website [link to be provided once the library website recovers from whatever database affliction it is currently suffering].

The other anniversary is upcoming -- in 2012 we in the Keys will be marking the centennial of the railway reaching Key West -- on Jan. 22, 1912, Henry Flagler himself rode the "first train" onto the island and was greeted by, essentially, the entire town population. The Key West Art & Historical Society is already planning a major exhibit, which I can't wait to see, and I'm sure many other events will spring up. If you're looking for a readable account of the railroad's construction and destruction, I recommend Les Standiford's Last Train to Paradise. There are a bunch of others that focus solely on the hurricane; I like this one because it captures both ends of this epic, tragic story that changed and defined the Keys.

The Lennox ladies

I can't remember where I heard about Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard -- I surf so many blogs and other sites with suggested reading titles -- but chances are good it was on a talk forum on LibraryThing, still the best bibliosocial networking site out there in my opinion. The book is a social history of upper class Britain in the latter half of the eighteenth century -- and a bit of the nineteenth -- as viewed through the lives of four sisters. Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox were the great-granddaughters of King Charles II, via one of his mistresses. Their grandfather, product of that union, was made the Duke of Richmond so their family was part of the aristocracy.

It's a great read; it could easily have been ponderous with all the personal and social detail to be filled in but it's not. Tillyard does a fantastic job in making people who have been dead for centuries understandable and in providing context for their times. The reality of their lives as women -- even privileged, wealthy women whose lives were far easier than 99 percent of people at that time -- is an interesting and useful corrective to the romantic aura surrounding that era, thanks to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer and a million imitators. I'm not dissing Austen et. al -- I'm a huge fan -- but somehow I feel a little more honest having a better idea of how life was really lived.

This family also happens to be a particularly good one for examining the time. Caroline Lennox, the eldest, married the politician Henry Fox and one of her sons was the even more prominent politican Charles James Fox. Emily Lennox married an Irish nobleman, later named a Duke, and with him had 19 children -- then produced another three with her second husband, who was definitely not nobility but was her children's tutor. Louisa Lennox was the most conventional; she also married an Irish nobleman and appeared to be happy in her marriage though they had no children. Sarah, the youngest sister in the book's focus, had the most dramatic life. The future George III fell in love with her but she wound up marrying another man -- very unhappily. She had affairs, which was not terribly unusual, but actually left her husband and wound up divorced, which was. Eventually she married a military officer and was the poorest of the sisters but happy with her lot. It was an interesting time for lots of reasons -- the king went mad, the French revolted, Napoleon was running amok and the industrial revolution was right on the horizon -- and the sisters were in the middle of a transition where love and fidelity within marriage were assuming greater importance -- heading for the Victorian era and all its conventions.

Now that I've read the book I'm eager to see the miniseries produced by the BBC in 1999 -- especially since Louisa is played by Anne-Marie Duff, better known to devotees of Shameless as our Fiona (she's married to James McEvoy, by the way). Anyway it's on the Netflix list. Once the Tour's over I may even get to it ...

Beastly tales

I just reviewed another work of nonfiction for my alma mater, The Miami Herald -- the book is Zoo Story by Thomas French and the review ran yesterday. I liked the book a lot -- it was obviously based on years of reporting, which is the sort of thing that the St. Petersburg Times has been able and willing to do -- and which may be pretty darn scarce on the ground in the future, even at papers owned by nonprofit foundations. The story follows the expansion and consequences of that expansion at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo, where the CEO pushed for an ambitious new Safari Africa exhibit featuring elephants imported from a game preserve in Swaziland. French makes characters out of some of the zoo's animals, which is dangerous -- my only problem with Mike Capuzzo's otherwise excellent Close to Shore was when he claimed to be inside the shark's head -- but French navigates the perilous territory very well, describing more of what happens to the animals than pretending to know what they're thinking.

The same book is reviewed today by Salon's Laura Miller, one of the best book reviewers in the business. Not that I'm intimidated or anything.

Recent reading roundup

I'm currently immersed in one of this summer's Hot Books -- The Passage by Justin Cronin -- which I'm attempting to read with Salon's Reading Club (look for a future post contrasting that with the One Book One Twitter experience reading American Gods -- the short version is that I like the Salon experience better, at least so far). And there are a couple other titles I've read in the last month between everything else -- though now we've got the cable with the World Cup on and the Tour de France right around the corner so my reading rate could slow right down. (There are three copies of The Passage in the Monroe County Library system, by the way, with two requests pending so if you want this one you should get on the list.) But here's a report on a couple of recent reads before they get too far into the rearview mirror. My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliviera -- historical fiction set during the Civil War about a midwife who longs to become a surgeon, with lots of family drama going on. For some reason, this one just didn't grab me though I did finish it. It struck me as one of those "look how much research I did into the time period" historical novels. That stuff needs to come through not quite so obviously. We do have it in the Monroe County Library collection, just not at the Key West Library. I'll give it 3 stars.

The Big Skinny by Carol Lay -- a graphic memoir (my favorite genre in the graphic format, I'm finding) about a woman's decision, at around the age of 50, to finally lose weight and keep it off. How does she do it? Why, she counts calories and exercises more! Amazing! The book has a great opening where Lay is at a party and some woman is marveling at her weight loss, asks her how she did it -- and is deeply unhappy with Lay's answer. People would prefer there were some magic bullet, of course, rather than the old "eat less and exercise more" answer. The rest of the book is both Lay's story of why she was chronically overweight and the strategies she uses to stay thin. I liked it a lot. Not in the Monroe County Public Library collection, unfortunately -- I got it through Interlibrary Loan (thanks, Palm Beach County!). 4 stars.

American Gods -- Neil Gaiman's novel about a war between the Old Gods (Norse, Egyptian, you name it) and the New Gods (technology, media, etc.) on American terrain was chosen for the inaugural One Book One Twitter read and I jumped on it for two reasons: I'd been meaning to read that book and I was feeling mildly guilty for being Twitterphobic. It was an interesting way to get to know Twitter and I'm glad I finally read some Gaiman. But it wasn't the best way to read a book, especially this book. I wound up finally jumping ahead of the two-to-three-chapters-a-week reading schedule and finishing it in one big rush. And I liked the novel a lot but I'd like to re-read it, not according to some Twitterific schedule. This one, by the way, is in the Key West Library collection. 4 stars.

Speaking of graphic memoirs, or memoirs in graphic novel format, or whatever the hell you want to call them, I'd been meaning to read Stitches by David Small since it came out -- it got fantastic reviews. And we even have it at the library. But I hadn't gotten around to it -- until I was looking at the program for the upcoming ALA conference and saw that Small will be appearing there, along with Time Traveler's Wife author Audrey Niffenegger (whom I had no idea was an artist, too). Anyway it was enough to send me over to our small-but-growing graphic novel collection to check it out on Saturday. I opened it after work and I think I finished it before the sun was down. It's great -- harrowing, for sure -- like all memoirs, in the graphic format unhappy childhoods make terrific narratives. And Small's art is great, too. My favorite in this level is still Alison Bechdel's Fun Home -- but this one is a close second. In fact, the only graphic memoir I think I didn't like was one where the "author" was not the artist. I'm not sure why -- it just didn't feel authentic in some way. But this one did. A great book. 4 1/2 stars.

Kicking it old media school

[gallery columns="2"] I don't know why this keeps happening, but I go months without writing a book review for print, then I write a couple -- and they both run on the same day. Go figure. It happened again today, with my review of Without A Paddle by Warren Richey in today's Miami Herald and my review of The Possessed by Elif Batuman in Solares Hill (only available these days as part of the Sunday Key West Citizen). Both are nonfiction and both are memoirs. I liked both books very much, though I came at them quite differently, which makes sense because they are very different.

Without A Paddle is the story of a midlife crisis, reached at age 50 when journalist Warren Richey is divorced and unsure about his purpose on the planet. He's got a promising new relationship and a son he loves deeply but his life has taken an unexpected turn. He falls for a sea kayak (purchased in what sounds a lot like Florida Bay Outfitters to me -- that's where we bought our kayaks!). Anyway he soon becomes part of a group of expedition kayak and sailboat racers called the WaterTribe that does these crazy cross-Everglades and other races -- and eventually what's called the Ultimate Florida Challenge, circumnavigating the state by water, with no mechanical power, and a 40 mile portage between rivers across the top. This is not my idea of a good time, but Richey pulls it off and he pulls the book off, too. I had some trouble in the beginning with the short chapters jumping around but I came to like and appreciate it.

Whereas, I loved The Possessed right from the get-go. I think Batuman is, essentially, more my kind of writer -- very funny and acerbic without being nasty. She's also appreciative and realistic about the people she's writing about. Batuman started out as a grad student in linguistics and Russian literature, and goes down some serious academic rabbit holes but maintains a real world perspective -- at least enough of a perspective that she can write about that world in a way normal humans can understand. Yes, it's true, I am bitter about academic writing -- especially in the humanities -- making itself unintelligible to the rest of us. Because if they're not shedding a wider light on human culture for the world, what exactly is the point? But I digress. Batuman's book covers a lot of territory, from an Isaac Babel conference at Stanford to a conference at the Tolstoy estate to a summer in Samarkand studying Uzbek that sounds far more entertaining to read about than to experience. But I didn't mind the jumping around a bit -- for one thing, the sections were whole, not short. And Batuman is a terrific writer. Both highly recommended. Without A Paddle: 3 1/2 stars, The Possessed: 4 stars.