Author: Dina Vargo Title: Hidden History of Boston Publication Info: Charleston, SC : The History Press, 2018. Previously Read by the Same Author: Wild Women of Boston Summary/Review:
Historian and fellow Boston By Foot Guide Dina Vargo writes about overlooked in moments in Boston history in her second book. This book includes dark moments in Boston history like anti-Catholic Pope’s Night riots, the boy serial killer Jesse Pomeroy, and the Tyler Street Massacre in Chinatown. It also covers disasters like the Summer Street Trolley Disaster, the Pickwick Club collapse, and the Zoo Shipwreck. All is not grim in Boston history, though, as this book also cover civil rights activists William Monroe Trotter activism that went straight up to President Woodrow Wilson and the settlement house social worker who became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, Amelia Earhart. If you like Boston history, this book is a quick and fun read from which you might learn a thing or two.
I visited my mother in New York this past weekend and together we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in traditional and unique ways.
The weekend began with a Big Onion Walking Tour of the Lower East Side area once known as Little Ireland.
We met our guide Erin at St. Paul’s Chapel, and although her name was appropos to the day, she told us she was not actually Irish. The St. Paul’s churchyard has a memorial – but not the actual grave – of Thomas Addis Emmet. He was the elder brother of famed Irish martyr Robert Emmet, and participated in the rebellious United Irishmen in the 1790s. Exiled to the United States, he did pretty well for himself, and even became New York Attorney General.
The next stop was at St. Peter Catholic Church, the oldest Catholic parish in New York, established in 1785. The current church building dates to 1840.
The Marble Palace is under scaffolding right now, but it is a historic landmark that once held America’s first department store. Opened in 1846, it was home to Alexander Turney Stewart’s dry goods store. Stewart was an Irish immigrant made good. The store provided same day tailoring of clothing thanks to dozens of seamstresses working on the top floor, many of them recent immigrants from Ireland.
The Tweed Courthouse is associated with the graft of Tammany Hall, the powerful political machine that was initially nativist but grew to welcome Irish Catholic immigrants in return for votes. Across the street is the former home of Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, founded in 1850 by the Irish Emigrant Society to protect the savings of newly arrived immigrants.
We took a brief tangent from Irish history to discuss the African Burial Ground, which was pretty cool. Nearby in Foley Square, in the midst of a rally opposing discrimination against Muslims, we talked about one of New York’s first suburbs, built on the site of the Collect Pond which was drained in 1811 through a canal at what is now Canal Street. Since it was a natural spring, the water returned, making the houses unstable. As the wealthy moved out, the poor occupied the abandoned houses and created New York’s first slum. A short walk away in a Chinatown playground, we talked about Five Points, the notorious neighborhood known for its mid-19th century gang violence. But it was also a place where Irish immigrants and free blacks got a toehold in the city, and even invented tap dancing!
On Mott Street, the Church of the Transfiguration shows the immigrant heritage of the neighborhood. Initially a place of worship for the growing Irish community in the 1840s, by World War I it was a largely Italian parish, as the names on the World War I memorial plaque indicate. Today the church serves a Chinese Catholic community.
Another fascinating diversion from the Irish theme was passing by the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic Jewish Graveyard, which is associated with Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, founded in 1654!
Around the corner, we visited another Roman Catholic church, St. James, where the Ancient Order of Hibernians was founded in 1836.
We stopped by Public School 1 to talk about how Irish Americans had their children educated. Erin also noted the architectural design of the school pays tribute to New York’s Dutch heritage. In the heart of Chinatown, we talked about the Chinese Exclusion Act and how an Irish American woman could lose her citizenship if she married a Chinese man. At the final stop, we discussed the notorious riot brought on by the conflict between two street gangs, the Irish American Dead Rabbits and the nativist Bowery Boys.
A pegasus flying over Chinatown. Because it’s awesome, that’s why.
Finishing our Irish tour in the heart of Chinatown, we of course had lunch at Thai Jasmine. It was yummy. Then we headed uptown to see part of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I hadn’t been to the parade since in 22 years, but had a lot of nostalgia for my childhood when it was an annual event. We remembered the year when the wind was so strong it blew wooden police barriers down the street like tumbleweeds, and told stories of family friends we met at the parade. I was impressed that the pipe and drum bands have significantly more women than in my childhood, and that black and latinx people were in the parade as participants as well as spectators, making it a much more diverse celebration than it used to be.
The crowds were light and I didn’t witness any misbehavior, which was also a plus, although it may have been due to the fact that we arrived late in the day and were way uptown. When the winds got too chilly, we decided to drop in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an hour or so. We wandered into a gallery of art from New Guinea, which was fascinating, and definitely not anything I’d ever seen before.
If the day wasn’t full enough already, we finished things of with a performance by the New York Philharmonic, who played Mozart’s Requiem, but only the parts that Mozart wrote. I had a peaceful half-nap to the music in the first half of the perfomance.
On Sunday, we went to the New York Botanical Garden for the Orchid Show. There were significantly fewer orchids on display than last year, and the greenhouses were very crowded, but it’s always a lovely place to visit regardless.
I like how these two photos turned out. One is a picture of the dome of the greenhouse, the other is the reflection of the dome in the water.
To finish out a proper St. Patrick’s Day, we went to An Beal Bocht Cafe in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. They had sweet Guinness poured properly and musicians playing a traditional Irish seisiún (although they snuck in a couple of crowd pleasers like “The Wild Rover”). It was crowded but friendly and definitely a place I’d like to visit again, albeit it’s a steep climb uphill from the subway station!
Title: Russian Doll Release Dates: 2019 Season: 1 Number of Episodes: 8 Summary/Review:
This clever tv show features the comedic talents of Natasha Lyonne as Nadia, a woman who dies repeatedly and keeps returning to relive her 36th birthday party. The time loop concept is similar to Groundhog’s Day, a similarity the show doesn’t try to hide. I also felt it shared some qualities with Donnie Darko, and Run, Lola, Run, especially in that the show feels like a video game character that dies and always returns to the same starting point. Not coincidentally, Nadia is a software designer for a game company who created a particularly difficult game.
The twist here – and this is a SPOILER if you haven’t watched the show – comes in the third episode cliffhanger where Nadia meets Alan (Charlie Barnett, who could easily be cast in an Alex Rodriguez biopic), a young man who is also repeatedly dying and coming back to life. While Nadia is struggling with her troubled childhood with her mentally ill mother (who died at the age of 36), Alan is challenged by being dumped by his long-time girlfriend on the night he planned to propose to her. The great thing about this show’s plot is not only to they have to come to terms with their problems in order to get on with their lives (literally here, but also metaphorically) but they also have to help one another to do so.
Russian Doll is by turns really dark, acerbically funny and very sweet.
Greetings long time readers of Panorama of the Mountains and anyone who may have just stumbled upon this blog today! In the month of April, I will once again be participating in the Blogging A to Z Challenge. The purpose of this challenge is to write a post each day of the month on something starting with each letter of the alphabet from A to Z. These posts can be something different each day just starting with a different letter, or they can be tied together with a theme across all the posts. Since there are 30 days in April and only 26 letters in the alphabet, we take Sundays off from posting. But the even bigger part of the challenge is finding other participants blogs and reading their posts and leaving comments, so Sundays are a good day to catch up!
This will be the fourth time I’ve particpated in the A to Z Challenge. In previous years, I blogged on different themes:
I’ve long loved music and wanted to do something musical with my A to Z, so this year my theme will be;
A Song and a Story
Great songs have meaning far beyond what the artists who create them intended. Songs are part of our daily experience and hearing them brings up images of people we love, places we’ve been, and the things we do. So for my A to Z Challenge, I will be writing about some of my favorite songs and telling a story I associate with those songs.
AND, because I’m feeling ambitious, I’m also going to try to watch and review documentary movies from A to Z again. That’s right TWO A to Z Challenges for the price of one.
If you have a blog and want to get involved in this fun and transformative experience, check out the official website for more details!
Author: John Hench Title: Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show Publication Info: Disney Editions (2009) Summary/Review:
John Hench joined the Walt Disney Studios animation department in 1939, became an Imagineer in 1954, and continued working up until a few days before his death in 2004. So there’s no one better to write about how Disney Parks are designed with an emphasis on detail and drawing the viewer in as an active participant. I particularly like how he talked about a three-dimensional cross-disolve, using a film term to describe the ways in Disney Imagineers design transitions between different lands and attractions. Hench also goes into great detail about how different colors are used, and how he gave a lot of thought to the color of the sky in Anaheim, Orlando, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong. This is a nice, richly illustrated dive into the world of imagineering, although I admit I’m still looking for the book that will really get into the nitty-gritty.
In a world where every movie trailer sounds exactly like every other movie trailer, how does one make their trailer stand out? The story of The Booj and other elements common to the blockbuster movie trailer formula. Confession: I love the sound of The Booj, but can live without the cheezy song covers.
This episode investigates several mysteries, including people who don’t clean up their dog’s poop, racist dogs, and why the New York City subway plays the opening notes of a song from West Side Story.
The first story is the oddly fascinating story of how discrimination against Black and gay people, a radio shockjock, and a baseball double-header collided to become a disastrous promotional event and The Night That Killed Disco.
The Electoral College is anti-democratic and despite what its supporters say does not help smaller states. This episode discusses alternatives such as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, replacing “winner take all” with proportional allotments, and eliminating the Electoral College entirely.
Album: Toothsayer Artist: Tanya Tagaq Release Date: March 2019 Thoughts: The throat singer Tanya Tagaq combines Inuit traditions with modern electronic, ambient, and industrial music. This 5-song EP was made to accompany the British National Maritime Museum’s “Polar Worlds” exhibit. Without words, Tagaq’s compositions paint vivid images of the extreme wildness of the Arctic, while expressing the danger of climate change and the asserting indigenous rights. Tagaq’s voice is a powerful and expressive instrument. Rating: ****
Author: Ben Mezrich Title: Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures Narrator: Ben Mezrich with epilogue read by George Church and afterward by Stewart Brand Publication Info: New York : Atria Books, 2017. Summary/Review:
This book at heart is a biography of George M. Church, a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, who was a key part of the Human Genome Project. The every curious and somewhat eccentric Church is currently working on a project to clone and de-extinct the wooly mammoth. Besides being awesome, there’s good reason to do this as the effect megafauna have on their habit can actually combat climate change by helping to lock in the permafrost.
Mezrich details Church’s childhood and rise to prominence in scientific research. A long section of the book details his romance with molecular biologist Ting Wu and how their marriage caused a Harvard administrator to discriminate against her getting a tenured position (its odd after this story that Ting doesn’t play much of a role in the rest of the book).
The bulk of the book focuses on the effort to create a mammoth, which seems oddly possible and unlikely at the same time. There arehumorous stories like the one where one of Church’s team attempting to get an elephant placenta in order to find elephant stem cells. Unrelated to Church’s story there’s a Russian scientist seeking mammoth remains in the Siberian tundra and a Korean scientist seeking redemption who are also interested in cloning a mammoth.
All in all, this book is incomplete, because mammoths have not been successfully cloned and it may be decades, if ever, before it happens. The science of genetics and the biology of mammoths – and there surviving relatives, the elephants – are all very interesting. Did you know that elephants don’t get cancer? But it feels like Mezrich is adding lots of details to the narrative to fill it out and give it some drama that’s just not there.
: Recommended books: Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predatorsby William Stolzenburg Rating: ***
This is the 50th book in the Virgin New Adventures and after five years of publishing books instead of producing Doctor Who tv shows, it’s time to celebrate. In traditional Doctor Who style, anniversary celebrations mean bringing back past characters. In this case, Cornell writes in connections to all 49 previous books in the series. If you’re like me and only read select few of the books in the series it means I don’t know who a lot of these people are, but it doesn’t prove to much of a problem.
The setting is the English village of Cheldon Bonniface, the same place featured in Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation, and the occasion is Bernice Summerfield’s marriage to Jason Kane. Berenice’s main plot is basically sitcom hijinks about getting into fights with Jason over his perceived infidelity and then having makeup sex. It’s so embarrassing it’s unbearable. Luckily, there’s a lot more going on. Ace, now going by the name Dorothee, is there as a bridesmaid and boasting about her sexual conquests, hoping to add Jason to the list (the books are VERY different from the tv show, no?). Both UNIT and a some Ice Warriors are there as an honor guard (they end up brawling in a village pub). Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson enlist Roz to aid them in solving a mystery. The Doctor gets the Isley Brothers as the wedding band. And there’s a very long cricket match where the wedding guests challenge the villagers.
It’s all rather cornball and daft. It’s not much as a book, but it’s a fun celebration of the continuity the Virgin New Adventures had created in keeping Doctor Who alive at a time when the show returning seemed unlikely. Obviously, this one is for fan’s only.
The fifth and possibly final Alcatraz book picks up where the previous one ended with Alcatraz having destroyed all of his family’s talents. Now he must ally with his mother – an evil librarian – to stop his father, a Free Kingdomer whose desire to give every one on Earth a Smedry Talent which could have disastrous consequences. Smedry and his team go to the Evil Librarian’s Highbrary – a.k.a The Library of Congress in an alternate universe version of Washington, DC. Unfortunately, Smedry’s friend and defender, Bastille remains in stasis for the better part of the book. Smedry and Bastille’s love/hate chemistry when they are together is one of the best part of the series and this book suffers from its absence (although when Bastille finally makes her entrance, it’s spectacular). The book has the usual clever wordplay – including a chapter of delicious puns – but it feels like Sanderson’s heart is not really in it anymore, and it is the weakest book in the series. Or it could be Alcatraz, who obstinately states this is the last part of his biography after an uncharacteristically dark ending to the book. But Alcatraz is an unreliable narrator who has lied to us before, and there are clues that this is all just a big cliffhanger leading to yet another book.
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
Panorama of the Mountains 