THE BOWERY: The Strange History of New York's Oldest Street
STEPHEN PAUL DEVILLO
Skyhorse
$16.99 ebook editions, available now
KINDLE EDITION ON SALE NOW! $1.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link)
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: It was the street your mother warned you about—even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.
The Bowery is New York's oldest street and Manhattan's broadest boulevard. Like the city itself, it has continually reinvented itself over the centuries. Named for the Dutch farms, or
bouweries, of the area, the path's lurid character was established early when it became the site of New Amsterdam's first murder. A natural spring near the Five Points neighborhood led to breweries and taverns that became home to the gangs of New York—the "Bowery B'hoys," "Plug Uglies," and "Dead Rabbits."
In the Gaslight Era, teenaged streetwalkers swallowed poison in McGurk's Suicide Hall. A brighter side to the street was reflected in places of amusement and culture over the years. A young P.T. Barnum got his start there, and Harry Houdini learned showmanship playing the music halls and dime museums. Poets, singers, hobos, gangsters, soldiers, travelers, preachers, storytellers, con-men, and reformers all gathered there. Its colorful cast of characters include Peter Stuyvesant, Steve Brodie, Carrie Nation, Stephen Foster, Stephen Crane, Carrie Joy Lovett, and even Abraham Lincoln.
The Bowery: The Strange History of New York's Oldest Street traces the full story of this once notorious thoroughfare from its pre-colonial origins to the present day.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I've lived in or near New York City for twenty-five of my sixty-*cough* years. I'm not surprised that I'm still learning stuff about my home town. And considering the astounding difference between the 1980s New York I moved to and the gentrified, sanitized Newyorkland it's become, I have no trouble relating to Author DeVillo's interesting browsing-book's premise of the many streets that Manhattan has called "The Bowery" over the centuries.
Exhaustively researched...the Bibliography and Endnotes will swell your TBRs, fellow New Yorkophiles!...and anecdotally presented, this is a perfect holiday-weekend-travel book. I call them "browsing books" because you can set it down at any point, pick it back up and take right up from where you left off. More than trivia lists, less than in-depth formal Histories, this is exactly what a beach bag or backpack needs loaded on your Kindle to stave off wait-time boredom.
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DAVID MOGO, GODHUNTER
SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA
Abaddon Books (
non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Nigerian God-Punk - a powerful and atmospheric urban fantasy set in Lagos.
Since the Orisha War that rained thousands of deities down on the streets of Lagos, David Mogo, demigod, scours Eko’s dank underbelly for a living wage as a freelance Godhunter. Despite pulling his biggest feat yet by capturing a high god for a renowned Eko wizard, David knows his job’s bad luck. He’s proved right when the wizard conjures a legion of Taboos—feral godling-child hybrids—to seize Lagos for himself. To fix his mistake and keep Lagos standing, David teams up with his foster wizard, the high god’s twin sister and a speech-impaired Muslim teenage girl to defeat the wizard.
I CHECKED THIS DELIGHT OF A BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY...USE THEM OFTEN!
My Review: ...and then I ran out and bought one so I could dip in and out, savoring my time with David Mogo the demigod with family problems, money problems, and a new job...freelance godhunters can't be all that choosy!...that he just *knows* is very, very bad luck and news.
I'd like to see the "controversy" about the Lagos setting and the use of Naijá dialect sometimes, plain Colonial English others, all sent to the bin for incineration, please. Most of the folk doing that whining are also guilty of whining about human beings in the US *daring* to speak Spanish or Vietnamese or whatever isn't familiar to them. Yes, dear, we know that when you're Privileged others having parity feels like an attack. You'll get used to it in time, and discover how enthralling it is to be inside somene else's world for once.
And it isn't like you've spent time whinging about learning what orcs are, or how to pronounce "Boba Fett", or that Han understands Jabba een though we don't...so let's just cut through the padding and call this what it is: Racism. Face it so you can start to fix it. And that is something you badly need to do.
The godpunk elements of the story...the facts of David's existence, the rain of gods that's seriously plaguing Lagos...are the real draw to this Continental-Op-in-Urban-Fantasy tale. We've got beaucoup examples of urban fantasy with old-fashioned loner/fixer PIs in them. Chicagoland has Harry Dresden, San Francisco has Toby Daye, New York City has Charlie Parker, Kaaro in a different Lagos, and the list goes on. I hope we can add David Mogo to this list permanently, with more adventures to come.
The novella length is tailor-made for use in lines, on planes, in trains and cabs. You can take your time with the read, of course, but you can also read novellas in quick hits. It's the most brilliant thing to happen in technology's long, ugly slide into surveillance, the presence of a reading app on every device you drag with you everywhere you go.
I was always amused, as I read the book on the town's boardwalk outside my building, at the responses of young Black people to my elderly white-beareded face shoved into the book. Several asked me why I was reading it, and after a few minutes of my gushing description of David hunting the godling in the cistern and how absolutely wonderful that scene would be on film, made polite noises and skedaddled.
Heh. *Still* scarin' the straight folk at sixty*ahem*!
As the Memorial Day travel weekend is here, with our new freedom from Plague restrictions I expect lots of y'all will travel. Take Doctor Suyi's David with you for the ride. Best $6 I've spent...on a book I've already read!
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DISASTERS AT SEA: A Visual History of Infamous Shipwrecks
LIZ MECHEM
Skyhorse
$14.95 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: The stories behind over sixty historical shipwrecks, with extensive illustrations.
Whether they’re caused by rough weather, human error, collision, piracy, or mutiny, shipwrecks are fascinating stories filled with history and human drama. This book reveals the facts behind numerous catastrophes around the world, and legends, myths, and mysteries of the sea from ancient to modern times—including widely known disasters such as the
Titanic and
Andrea Doria, as well as the cases of:
The
San Agustin
The 1715 Treasure Fleet
USS
Monitor
The
Endurance
SS
Edmund Fitzgerald
RMS
Empress of Ireland
The
Henrietta Marie
HMS
Bounty
The
Mary Celeste
The
General Slocum
The
Flying Dutchman
And many more
Includes detailed maps and shipwreck locations
I BORROWED THIS BROWSER'S DELIGHT FROM THE PRIME READING LIBRARY AT AMAZON. INCLUDED WITH PRIME!
My Review: It felt a bit odd to recommend a book of shipwrecks on a travel holiday blog post. I'll tell y'all what, though, it's nowhere near as odd as recommending a reader go spend yet more money than they already are on a holiday travel weekend...and thus this free-to-read recommendation.
This is eye-candy, pure and simple. Of course there is a bibliography, de rigueur in modern publishing, and it also has a very nice Index with hyperlinks to the subjects! It's really designed to be a picture book though, a lovely ornamental thing; those fare notoriously poorly on the Kindle. The small screen, the limited graphics capability, the inevitable awfulness of publishers' preferred Satanic nightmare, the PDF, playing badly with Amazon's technology so no one will be able to enjoy them. UNLESS you've sprung for a Fire tablet.
Now we're cookin' with gas.
Skyhorse, this book's publisher, has landed in the news here lately for their determinedly contrarian actions. What I think of that isn't meant for this occasion. What I think of their willingness and apparent ability to make illustrated history and nature and such-like ebooks available inexpensively and in formats that play well with Amazon's tech is entirely laudable.
This book is designed for browsers. There are call-out boxes labeled "Flotsam and Jetsam." There is beautiful chapter-opening art:
Shipwreck on a Rocky Coast, Wijnand Nuijen (1837)—from Wikimedia Commons...opens Chapter 2, "The Fatal Flaw"
I think that's pretty much the perfect tone for art I'm happy to look at for holiday travels taken in crowded modern conditions! And the chapters have self-contained stories about the events leading up to, surrounding, and following the shipwrecks; there are trivia sidebars about people, places, and inventions (lots of inventions!
Mel Fisher's "mailbox," invented to seek the treasure galleon
Nuestra Se&ntil;a de Atocha in the Florida Keys, is by itself worthy of a book) related to, stemming from, or causing (in a few cases) the shipwrecks.
The famous wrecks...the
Titanic and the
Mary Celeste and the
Indianapolis are all there. The freshwater sinkings of the
General Slocum:
The General Slocum burning in the East River, 1904...contemporary photo via Wikimedia Commons
...and the
Eastland and the
Sultana. All those get their due; the memories of stories half-heard on TV shows about ancient aliens and the like get their proper debunking in sections on the Bermuda Triangle; the pirates of the Caribbean (not the Mauschwitz version!) and their
Queen Anne's Revenge sagas are touched lightly on. No tum, sodomy, and the lash for this book!
*sigh*
Arctic and Antarctic exploration losses like the
Endurance in Antarctica and the
HMS Terror and
HMS Erebus of the newly re-remembered Franklin Expedition (if you haven't watched the TV show
The Terror, load it up now!) all come in for scrutiny as well. I am always down for a mental trip to the icy parts of the world in summertime:
The Sea of Ice, Caspar David Friedrich (1824)—Wikimedia Commons again
Doesn't that just take the Curse of Summer right off your mind? Pity it can't act like sunscreen too.
A bit of attention goes to the supernatural-tinged stories, like that of the
Flying Dutchman, but there we go...must sell books. And buy them we must, too, of course...but if cash is tight and the various travels have stretched the plastic a bit too far, procure this fom Prime Reading.
If you're traveling, in spirit or flesh, I wish you godspeed and urge you to spend a bit of time, in bursts as long or as short as you need them to be, with a lovely, informative, and entertaining companion...a book.
