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A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.
The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!
My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.
A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.
This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.
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I very much enjoyed the Stuart Turton book (it was just the 7 deaths in the UK edition!), and couldn't put it down.
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And if you really want to go deep she wrote a book about 60s radicals although I imagine only someone who occasionally gets obsessive about an author and turned that obsession to Hanff would actually care about it. I'm not sure how easy it is to track that one down. The Philadelphia Free Library had to pull it out of the stacks for me and I was the first person to ask for it in a long while.
I am intrigued by The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. That one is going on my to-read list.
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"84 Charing Cross Road" was included in the Readers Digest Condensed Book series, IIRC, which would have exposed it to a ton of readers who might not have heard of it otherwise.
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That's amazing.
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Industrial molasses is a thing, but I hadn’t known about its uses in bomb making. I no longer remember where, but some communities are experimenting with using it as road de-icer in place of salt. Doesn’t damage concrete or roadside ecology—the runoff act like a mild fertilizer for the local soil microbes.
The screw shrapnel thing is horrifying. Fluid physics has no pity.
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It's amazing what people find appropriate to play for laughs. I found out about this game proposal last week, in a group of Boston geeks where opinion was divided about whether it was in excessively bad taste. But the kickstarter is fully funded already.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/molassacre1919/molassacre-historical-card-game-on-the-1919-molasses-flood
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When Puleo writes that "a few works of children's fiction allude to the event, but the story lines of these books generally focus on fun and adventure in a fanciful 'world of molasses,'" he is almost certainly thinking of Marjorie Stover's Patrick and the Great Molasses Explosion (1985), which does elide the death toll in favor of the moral of too much of a good thing—the afterword acknowledges that there were deaths, but in the text itself Patrick gets tripped up in the flood while trying to scoop himself a pailful from the edge of it and wanders home licking it off his fingers, the reader is reassured that people from all over Boston worked to unstick the human and animal victims of the flood, and Patrick who started the day dreaming insatiably of molasses as usual ends it by deciding that maybe he's had enough after all. Joan Hiatt Harlow wrote a much more serious and scarier treatment for young readers in Joshua's Song (2001), but thanks to the lag time of traditional publication it's hard for me to know whether Puleo would have seen it by the time he turned in the manuscript for Dark Tide (2003). I don't know any others off the top of my head, but children's literature is such a weird field, I'm not going to bet against their existence. I had very obviously heard of the disaster before reading Puleo, but to my knowledge no one before him had devoted an entire nonfiction book to the subject of the molasses flood and his research is sound, however badly the foreword grated on you. I would still recommend it.
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It's a thing you can buy on eBay! I would not necessarily have been as sarcastic about it as Puleo (unless he had read some other example that was really twee), but he does seem to bear American history something of a grudge for losing track of a tragedy as bizarro and yet illuminating as a molasses flood. His book did a lot to raise its profile. It is much easier to find literature incorporating the molasses flood these days. I ran into some random historical novel earlier this year which was set in Boston in the nineteen-teens and sure enough, molasses flood.
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DARK TIDE ALSO DROVE ME UP A WALL
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What bugged you about Dark Tide?
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