For Your Reading Pleasure...

Some books that I have recently read......

In 1870, engineer and inventor Alfred Ely Beach dug out a tunnel under a couple of blocks beneath Broadway, installed a passenger car that would take people from Point A to Point B in New York City via a pneumatic tube, and thus was born the city's first subway.  The amazing thing is that Beach was able to do this in secret!

How he pulled this off is the story that my friend Matthew Algeo tells in his latest book, "New York's Secret Subway".  It is a story of New York at a certain time in history. A city with streets clogged with people, horse drawn "omni-buses" and carriages for hire, horse shit, and sometimes even dead horses.  A city wherein it took hours to travel short distances, distances that could be traversed in minutes if a transit system such as the one Beach was proposing - and building - was put in place.

A sure thing, right?  Well, not exactly because what stood in the way of Beach, and a few other visionaries like him, were a lot of special interests, like the horse carriage trade that might be put out of business, retailers who relied on foot traffic on Broadway, and lots of crooked politicians looking to get their palms greased.  In other words, life in 1870 was a lot like life in 2025, which is one of the points that Algeo makes in this book.

In addition to Beach, the narrative in this book revolves around NYC politician and power broker William "Boss" Tweed, who you may have learned about in your high school American History classes.  Another guy is someone about whom I had never heard, Alexander T. Stewart, a retailer who might have been one of the richest people in America at the time, and who would stop at nothing to make sure that there would NEVER be anything put in place that would cause people to be taken off of the sidewalks and thus be unable to walk past his storefronts.

It is an interesting book about a subject that I knew nothing about, and Algeo tells it in a breezy and oft times humorous manner.  Like his books on Harry Truman, Grover Cleveland, Robert Kennedy (the good one; not the current one), the sport of pedestrianism, the war time Steagles, and Abe Lincoln's pet dog you learn not only about the specific subject, Beach's secret subway, but other collateral issues, like how burgeoning populations that caused people to move further out from city areas created a need for what we now call mass transit, and of course how the wheels needed to be greased with the politicians in order to get anything  accomplished.  I even learned something about one of my former employers, the Equitable Life Assurance Society, in this one.

The Grandstander gives Three Stars to this one, which, I hope will put a smile on the author's face like the one below.

Matthew Algeo and his latest

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If you are a movie buff or a fan of the 1950 classic movie, "Sunset Boulevard", or both, then here is a book for you. As the sub-title suggests, this is an in-depth study of the "behind the scenes" stuff that went into the making of that terrific movie, which celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2025.

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you might, but most likely don't, remember that I wrote of a similar book way back in 2012.  This one was a lot better than that one.  My only quibble on this book is that it is written in an almost scholarly fashion, something like a doctoral thesis in film Studies.  However, it's not like there is anything wrong with that.  In fact, what I probably most liked about this one was the biographical details of all of the principals involved in this movie.  Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olsen, Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and even Cecil B. DeMille.  Some of this stuff I had already known, but I learned a lot about Gloria Swanson that I did not know and came away from this book with a real admiration for her.  Lupin carries it forward with a sort of "whatever became of" coda in the book for all of the featured players from this great film.

If you've never seen "Sunset Boulevard" make it a point to seek it out and watch it.  Then read this book.  Then watch the movie again. 

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

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And if you're looking for a novel for sheer entertainment purposes, some mental junk food, if you will, then I highly recommend "Parents Weekend" by Alex Finlay.

It's Parents Weekend at Santa Clara University, and four sets of parents of freshman students arrive on campus to spend a weekend with their children.  At the welcoming dinner on Friday  evening, the parents show up at the designated restaurant, but none of their children do.   What happened?  Is it a case of irresponsible college kids just being irresponsible college kids, or is there something more sinister at play here?

Well, of course there is, or else we wouldn't have a story here, would we?  The story is told from various points of view.  There is each of the kids' viewpoints, of course, but also the parents POV as well, and what a group they are:  a divorced mother who is a Very Important Person in the State Department who must travel with a team of security agents, a wealthy plastic surgeon to the rich and famous and his wife whose marriage is teetering on the rocks, a high profile judge and his wife who also are in a teetering marriage, but for a different reason, a single mother who works as a secretary in the University Dean's office so her son can go to college for free, and there is a fifth student involved, one whose parents are not in attendance, because his father is living in a halfway house after just getting out of prison after serving time as a convicted child sexual predator. Whew! Oh, and does the disappearance of these five students have anything to do with the magic death of another student earlier in the week?   The investigation into the crime, if, indeed, a crime has been committed, is led by a female FBI agent, who apparently is a recurring character in other Alex Finlay novels.

Like I said, this thriller novel is a pure entertainment piece.  Two weeks from now I probably won't be able to tell you much about it other than it was easy reading and fast paced.  I blew through it in three sittings, and I highly recommend it.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.