Eve Zibart

HistoryBiography

Wild Bill

Review by Eve Zibart

America’s frontier may have been a vast and solitary expanse, but as it turns out, the Wild West was a small world after all.

Legendary scout Kit Carson gave “Wild Bill” Hickok a Colt pistol; Hickok intervened when a bully threatened the young Buffalo Bill Cody, possibly saving his life; and they were friends until Hickok’s untimely death. He was cozy with Gen. George Armstrong Custer (and perhaps even cozier with Mrs. Custer) and hung out with such debatable desperadoes as the James brothers and John Wesley Hardin. And despite the popular broadsides-to-Broadway stories about Calamity Jane, his real true love was a circus performer/entrepreneur 11 years his senior, and they were only married for four months before his murder. (That Jane was buried next to him seems to have been a sort of joke.)

Oh, and his name wasn’t William, or Bill, or even “Shanghai Bill,” his Jayhawker nickname: It was James Butler Hickok, son of an abolitionist host along the Underground Railroad in Illinois.

Buffalo Bill Cody was a soldier, a scout and a spy, a lawman and a gambler, a prospector and a trapper, a theatrical star and, most famously, an ambidextrous dead shot, who in 1865 won what many people consider the first quick-draw duel in the West. In addition to his Colts, he carried a pair of derringers, a Bowie knife and sometimes a rifle or shotgun.

And while Wild Bill may not have been a mountain man, he was certainly a mountain of a man: fully six feet tall, handsome, well-spoken, a graceful writer and habitually dressed, like his friends Cody and Armstrong, in a fantastical hybrid of high collars and fringed buckskin—frontier Edwardian, the 19th century equivalent of steampunk. (Happily, unlike almost all his contemporaries, Hickok bathed every day.)

Strikingly poignant is the fact that the unmatched marksman was already losing his eyesight in his early 30s, one reason he always sat with his back to the wall at the poker table—well, that and his long having been a target for wannabe gunslingers. He took to wearing blue-tinted spectacles, and though he blamed the trouble on circus fireworks, it was likely glaucoma. Because of this, the day another gambler refused to cede Hickok his usual chair, a petty criminal was able to creep up and shoot Hickok in the back. He was just short of 40.

And yes, the “dead man’s hand” of aces and eights is real; the fifth card, Clavin says, was a queen.

While “Wild Bill” Hickok may not have been a mountain man, he was certainly a mountain of a man: fully six feet tall, handsome, well-spoken, a graceful writer and habitually dressed in a fantastical hybrid of high collars and fringed buckskin—frontier Edwardian, the 19th century equivalent of steampunk.
NonfictionArts & CultureArt

In Miniature

Review by Eve Zibart

Imagine reading an issue of BookPage—in fact, reading all the books reviewed—in a volume the size of a matchbox. Then imagine reading even tinier illustrated books—not just the best-known poems of Shakespeare, but his entire folio. Now imagine reading something so small that it requires a microscope.

Simon Garfield, whose previous book explored the creation and variety of movable type fonts, turns his relaxed, fireside-chatty tone (and a sprinkling of puns) to the human fascination with not size, but scale. In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World is a charming collage of historical vignettes and commentary, wandering from tiny volumes and flea circuses to miniature railroads, both the hugely commercial layouts and the private escapes of such enthusiasts as Rod Stewart, Neil Young and Roger Daltrey (rock stars and railroading—who knew?).

Model villages—and the single-minded artists who created them—are monuments to imagination (Chinese human hair is used for roof thatching) and sheer doggedness (a one-inch clematis vine features 201 minuscule leaves). A photo of then-Princess Elizabeth towering over her future domain at Bekonscot Model Village is oddly gripping—her face is presciently grave, as war has not come to either Bekonscot or Britain.

Garfield has a particular fascination with the Eiffel Tower, which appears throughout the book in various forms and sizes, from a man-size toothpick model and the half-sized tower in Las Vegas to the merely 76-foot version in Walt Disney World, plus dozens of others around the globe. They are designed to, as Garfield puts it, “shrink the world.” But while the 1889 view from nearly 1,000 feet up gave some visitors an almost celestial vision of the city of boulevards and cathedrals, others found their own “shrinking” somewhat disorienting. Art critic Robert Hughes compared the experience to the first view of Earth from the moon, but do we become greater or tinier? Is that an issue of size, or of scale?

And is there a reason why the pharaohs of ancient Egypt buried hundreds of miniature statuettes in their tombs to serve them in the afterlife, while the Emperor Qin had more than 8,000 life-size warriors and cavalry buried in his? Conviction or mere convenience? Weigh that on your philosophical scale.

Simon Garfield, whose previous book explored the creation and variety of movable type fonts, turns his relaxed, fireside-chatty tone (and a sprinkling of puns) to the human fascination with not size, but scale. In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World is a charming collage of historical vignettes and commentary, wandering from tiny volumes and flea circuses to miniature railroads, both the hugely commercial layouts and the private escapes of such enthusiasts as Rod Stewart, Neil Young and Roger Daltrey (rock stars and railroading—who knew?).

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Shotguns and Stagecoaches

Review by Eve Zibart

If you assume that Hollywood went overboard portraying the derring-do of the shotgun riders of the Old West, think again. These guys were as daredevil, dogged and—according to the tintypes—dashing as any Louis L’Amour novel hero. And the highway bandits (and occasional Wells Fargo turncoat) were every bit as colorful and defiant as those in a romantic ballad. Shotguns and Stagecoaches author John Boessenecker is an unabashed lover of the wild, wild West, and quite frankly, he loves the tales of the bad men as much as those of the good guys. This fun, flamboyant read is his ninth book, and it reads a little like a wall of wanted posters, handlebar mustaches and all.

Henry Wells and William G. Fargo were owners of American Express, but after the discovery of gold in California, they realized that the western half of the United States needed a mail delivery system, especially for valuable commodities. So Wells and Fargo recruited a small army of armed guards, called shotgun messengers. Some of the property they were transporting was astonishing—like thousands of dollars’ worth of gold dust. And it wasn’t just shotguns they used to protect their cargo, but pistols, rifles, knives, whatever came to hand and sheer nerve.

The shotgun messengers were a truly colorful crowd, crossing the legal boundaries in both directions, and often more than once. Some were former or future justice officers, some just happened to be good shots, while others were failed gold miners at unwanted leisure. The luckiest, or smartest, lasted the longest: Henry Ward worked for almost 50 years as shotgun messenger and driver.

Most of the reference material Boessenecker uses is from the period, like contemporary newspaper reports, and the fervid prose has seeped into the text. But that’s much of the fun of the book; short, dramatic scenes and crosscutting violence.

Perhaps the most interesting, and saddest, facet of these mini bios is how many of the stagecoach heroes died lonely, crippled and even destitute—divorced after years of absence, wracked by wounds and hard riding and, in many cases, even harder drinking. Barkeep! Shots for the shotgun messengers.

If you assume that Hollywood went overboard portraying the derring-do of the shotgun riders of the Old West, think again. These guys were as daredevil, dogged and—according to the tintypes—dashing as any Louis L’Amour novel hero.

NonfictionBiography

The Invisible Emperor

Review by Eve Zibart

Though it may be best suited for initiates of Napoleona, The Invisible Emperor details the deceptively calm but ultimately catastrophic interlude in the 25-year military career of one of history’s most famous soldiers, Napoleon.

Historian Mark Braude has re-created a detailed description of the emperor’s 10-month exile from France to the island of Elba. Napoleon’s new dominion lay only six miles off the Tuscan coast and 30 miles from Napoleon’s native Corsica, but to his captors, it seemed isolated enough for security and near enough for scrutiny. At the time, Elba was a French territory, which allowed for some familiarity of language and custom for Napoleon, and his guards even cultivated some loyalty toward the stocky little soldier, who whether for comfort or clever camaraderie preferred worn-out and undecorated old military garb as he wandered about the countryside.

Napoleon’s primary jailor, Neil Campbell, was an injured British colonel assigned, rather ambiguously, to “accompany” Napoleon in his new estate, which was quite lavish for an abdicated general. Still titled “emperor,” albeit only of Elba, Napoleon threw parties, ordered extensive renovations for his wife and son when they joined him in exile (they never did), had ships, horses and carriages delivered, and picked out several residences with good views. A man who once controlled nearly the entire European continent between Russian and Great Britain could now truly say he was lord of all he surveyed—86 square miles.

But if Napoleon’s weakness was stubborn ambition, his strength was strategy. Within the year, with only a thousand or so soldiers, he marched to Paris without even a skirmish. The next few months, now known as “the Hundred Days,” culminated in the Battle of Waterloo and the deaths of nearly 50,00 combatants.

Braude’s narrow focus on this “invisible” interlude dangles bits of psychological suppositions not always entirely supported, but his view of a man still caught up in his own self-image—one which, it must be admitted, was shared by many others—is intriguing.

Though it may be best suited for initiates of Napoleona, The Invisible Emperor details the deceptively calm but ultimately catastrophic interlude in the 25-year military career of one of history’s most famous soldiers, Napoleon.

NonfictionHistory

A doomed royal family

Review by Eve Zibart

By the early 20th century, thanks to Queen Victoria’s prodigious matchmaking, almost all the ruling families across Europe were related. Among Victoria’s favorite grandchildren was Alexandra Feodorovna, who went on to marry her cousin Nicholas II, the czar of Russia. Alexandra’s new husband looked so similar to George, their mutual cousin and the future king of England, that they could have passed for identical twins.

So why, given all the family ties, were “Alicky” and “Nicky” left to die at the hands of revolutionaries? Many of the royal cousins attempted to create a plan for rescue, but the bulk of the blame for their deaths has generally been laid on King George V. But in her new book, The Race to Save the Romanovs, historian Helen Rappaport argues that British anti-royal sentiment in that era was so strong that rescuing the Romanovs could have been disastrous for King George’s family.

This is not the sweet, sacrificial Nicholas and Alexandra of other biographies. Rappaport writes—with substantial evidence—that the czar was a weak leader, and the czarina was a decided and sometimes oblivious partisan. They were, however, deeply devoted to one another and to their children. Rappaport concludes that no rescue attempt would have succeeded because the Romanovs would never have abandoned the motherland.

Ultimately, however, what resonates is the irony of the book’s title. There was no “race,” or even a jog: The Romanovs were all but abandoned by their extended family.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

By the early 20th century, thanks to Queen Victoria’s prodigious matchmaking, almost all the ruling families across Europe were related. Among Victoria’s favorite grandchildren was Alexandra Feodorovna, who went on to marry her cousin Nicholas II, the czar of Russia. Alexandra’s new husband looked so similar to George, their mutual cousin and the future king of England, that they could have passed for identical twins.

NonfictionBiography

The life of a beloved, troubled icon

Review by Eve Zibart

What is the lesson of the tin soldier? The mightiest may someday melt down, but never retreat.

Addiction is a catchall phrase these days, and Robin Williams, who killed himself in 2014, was certainly an alcoholic and addict off and on throughout his life, but his real cravings were emotional and psychological. His explosive comedic energy, which at times poured out as if he had plunged a needle into some secret vein of creativity, rushed him toward success just as it pushed him continually to get higher. He idolized many who admired him, but rarely felt secure in their estimation. Ultimately, his desire for laughter and critical affirmation—despite the peer and public acclaim for his work—escalated to a level that could never be fulfilled.

Dave Itzkoff’s exhaustive and exhausting biography of the inimitable comedian and actor, Robin, meticulously traces Williams’ life and career, his seemingly overnight success, marriages, infidelities and closest friendships, using extensive personal interviews of family and friends. Itzkoff largely allows Williams’ inner circle to supply the psychological analysis on the late creative genius.

The fable of the sweet-tempered Williams grows sadder, of course, and the details of his final years are excruciatingly sad: Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he was forced to witness the deaths of two of his closest friends, Christopher Reed and Richard Pryor, from physically debilitating diseases. After Williams’ suicide, the autopsy revealed that he was suffering from not only depression and heart disease but also Lewy body dementia, misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease, which in addition to increasing motor problems causes insomnia, paranoia, hallucinations and other symptoms that would have terrified even someone whose mind was not his universe, as Williams’ was.

Oh, and the soldier? Robin’s first childhood audience was his toy soldiers, who marched around the world—perhaps the universe—at his command. He never stopped loving them, and they were on guard during Williams’ final days.

Addiction is a catchall phrase these days, and Robin Williams, who killed himself in 2014, was certainly an alcoholic and addict off and on throughout his life, but his real cravings were emotional and psychological. His explosive comedic energy, which at times poured out as if he had plunged a needle into some secret vein of creativity, rushed him toward success just as it pushed him continually to get higher. He idolized many who admired him, but rarely felt secure in their estimation. Ultimately, his desire for laughter and critical affirmation—despite the peer and public acclaim for his work—escalated to a level that could never be fulfilled.

NonfictionBiography

The thorn in Her Majesty’s side

Review by Eve Zibart

Living long and reasonably well is at least some sort of revenge. But the adage that best sums up the life of Lettice Knollys is that double-edged blessing: “May you live in interesting times.”

Lettice Knollys, subject of Nicola Tallis’ biography Elizabeth’s Rival, lived to age 91—in effect, the entire Elizabethan age, as well as the first generation of Stuarts—and in her time was as famous and notorious as Queen Elizabeth herself. But her life has been nearly obscured since. Even this exhaustive profile, subtitled “The Tumultuous Life of the Countess of Leicester: The Romance and Conspiracy That Threatened Queen Elizabeth’s Court,” slides away from her name. Nevertheless, the “romance and conspiracy” were of crucial interest in the evolution of the Tudor dynasty.

Blood and romance were always in the mix for Lettice Knollys. Lettice was the daughter of Katherine Carey, the daughter of “the other Boleyn girl,” Mary. It was widely believed, if never acknowledged, that Katherine was the product of Mary’s affair with King Henry VIII, making Lettice not merely Elizabeth’s cousin but likely her niece, a theory bolstered by the women’s strong resemblance to each other.

As a young woman, Lettice was in the queen’s favor. Her first husband, Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, led a royal army into Ireland not once but twice—expensively, ineffectually and eventually fateful, as he died of dysentery there. Conquering Ireland is just one of the instincts their son Robert Devereaux inherited.

Walter’s campaigns left Lettice in grave debt, but after his death, Lettice secretly married Queen Elizabeth’s longtime favorite suitor, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and all hell’s fury erupted. Elizabeth never forgave Lettice. After Dudley’s death, Elizabeth moved onto another favorite: Robert Devereaux, Lettice’s son. His relationship with the queen and his Irish war fared even worse that his father’s and stepfather’s similar designs. And it was he, in his spoiled self-confidence, who launched an insurrection that would doom himself and his second stepfather (Lettice’s third husband) to execution.

It was the queen mother of all soap operas, and the book is littered with expensive gifts, castles, gems, balls and pageants as well as armadas and invasions, to the extent that Lettice is almost obscured once again. Tudor newbies may be overwhelmed, but this tale of a vengeful monarch and her necessarily wily relative is a pleasure.

Living long and reasonably well is at least some sort of revenge. But the adage that best sums up the life of Lettice Knollys is that double-edged blessing: “May you live in interesting times.”

Nonfiction

Behind closed eyes

Review by Eve Zibart

Sleep and I have had a cantankerous relationship all my life, and from what I learned from Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, there is unlikely to be any conciliation. Neuroscientist Walker, who started his career as a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School before coming to believe the two fields of psychiatry and sleep were interconnected, has been wiring up sleep subjects for more than 20 years. In this accessible but impressively documented book, he describes both the benefits of sleep and dreaming and the critical health issues that arise from insufficient sleep. With serious sleep deprivation, the brain suffers loss of memory and learning capacity, emotional and mental health stress, aggression, hallucination, high blood pressure and hormonal imbalances. Frankly, reading this book can keep you up at night.

Walker looks at the curve of sleep patterns over a lifetime, mapping children’s late-breaking circadian rhythms (children may have an excuse for dragging their feet to school), the maturation of the brain from back to front (your teenager really is functioning with less than a total brain) to dismissing the myth that older adults don’t need more sleep, arguing that factors such as increased medications, social drinking and the need to get up in the dark are disruptive. Lack of sleep is also linked to Alzheimer’s and dementia. Walker takes on insomnia, narcolepsy, sleeping pills, decoding of dreams (including anecdotes about Keith Richards and Mary Shelley), and comes down hard on the extreme danger of driving on too little sleep—friends don’t let friends drive drowsy.

In this accessible but impressively documented book, neuroscientist Matthew Walker describes both the benefits of sleep and dreaming and the critical health issues that arise from insufficient sleep.

NonfictionMemoir

Tales from the liberated kitchen

Review by Eve Zibart

People often associate Julia Child, who made French food accessible to the home cook, with Alice Waters, whose restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, was one of the epicenters for the movement toward simple, locavore dining. And the two culinary queens do have much in common, especially as crusaders for what might be called “real food” in a time when most Americans’ dining experiences ran the culinary gamut from A to B, as Dorothy Parker would say.

But while Child and Waters are both legendary free spirits, there are striking differences between the two. Child was a classicist who mastered technique and fine detail, a quirky sophisticate who believed “all things in moderation,” while Waters, a card-carrying advocate of 1960s-style exuberance, is a hedonist, punch-drunk with flavor and scent and texture.

Waters’ new memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, is a reminiscence of an extended adolescence spent not only navigating the enticements of postwar liberation—drinking, sex, art and anti-establishment politics—but also foreign countries, including France, Turkey, Georgia and Greece, to name a few, places that embrace community and kindness as much as food and cooking.

Waters’ memoir, as touching as it sometimes is, can be a little helter-skelter: There are italicized inserts that shoulder into the narrative, supplying details of a person’s biography or offering foreshadowing or philosophical asides. And there are plenty of famous names dropped, unavoidably, as Waters’ friends are connected to an impressive array of filmmakers, more experienced chefs, artists and writers.

These diary-like passages, and Waters’ almost stream-of-consciousness remarks on the importance of mood, music, visual arts and flowers on the dining experience, come to a head with the hilariously chaotic opening of Chez Panisse in 1971. If the way to counterculture’s heart is through its stomach, Chez Panisse is the start.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Waters’ new memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, is a reminiscence of an extended adolescence spent not only navigating the enticements of postwar liberation—drinking, sex, art and anti-establishment politics—but also foreign countries, including France, Turkey, Georgia and Greece, to name a few, places that embrace community and kindness as much as food and cooking.

NonfictionMemoir

Looking back with wit and warmth

Review by Eve Zibart

Adam Gopnik is a flâneur, a voyeur of streetscapes, crowds and singular personalities. He’s a romantic—his wife, Martha, to whom his memoir At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York is dedicated, is described with a disarming mixture of wryness and adoration—and he is frequently a cynic and a sentimentalist within the span of a few paragraphs. A sensualist, he often uses food as a metaphor as he reflects on both personal and cultural ambition. He infers, he observes—and then he composes. Because above all else, Gopnik is a writer.

At the Strangers’ Gate is part memoir, part meditation on his (and Martha’s) journey from Montreal to New York, and ultimately to The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer for some 30 years. They came to New York in the 1980s, a decade of upheaval and reinvention, and wondered at it, indulged in it and alternately looked up to and down at its creators. When they move from their tiny uptown basement apartment to another lucky strike, a loft in SoHo, he discovers a village of artists, writers, Bohemians, cobblestones—all of which seems of a piece to his expanding worldview.

Occasionally, Gopnik’s love for the epigram trips the reader up: “Art traps time, but food traps manners. The art lasts, the food rots.” This is his introduction into a recollection of not only his life in SoHo but also his fledgling professional art criticism and gradual breakthrough into the literary universe. At the Strangers’ Gate is a book studded with nuggets of fine prose, best tasted in smaller sections.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Adam Gopnik is a flâneur, a voyeur of streetscapes, crowds and singular personalities. Above all else, Gopnik is a writer.

NonfictionTrue Crime

The heiress and the photographer

Review by Eve Zibart

The butler did it (or at least, he lit the fire, by taping more than 20 hours of incriminating conversations). And that’s just the first of the many apt clichés about a scandal that has gripped France for a decade.

The story of this convoluted war of wills (pun intended), told with skill by former Time Paris bureau chief Tom Sancton in The Bettencourt Affair, features a cast of characters pulled straight from a Tolstoy novel: L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, the $40 billion-dollar woman; her only child, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, vying for control of her mother’s life (and her money); and the flamboyant, brash photographer François-Marie Banier who, over the course of a quarter-century, befriended the likes of Truman Capote and Salvador Dalí and then insinuated himself into hundreds of millions of the Bettencourt’s fortune.

Nearly deaf since childhood and married to a respectable but acquiescent diplomat, Liliane delighted in Banier’s theatrical manner and his artistic aspirations, lavishing upon him artworks by Picasso and Matisse, insurance policies and cash gifts; she even reportedly considered adopting him. But her family and staff believed he was taking advantage of her age and increasing mental frailty, which was the crux of her daughter’s lawsuit against Banier.

In the end, the lawsuit revealed political hand-offs, money laundering, Swiss and offshore accounts, as well as Fascist and Nazi collaboration. The entire ordeal is known in France as l’affair Bettencourt, which culminated in years of prosecutorial expense, suicides and the downfall of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and several ministers and judges.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The butler did it (or at least, he lit the fire, by taping more than 20 hours of incriminating conversations). And that’s just the first of the many apt clichés about a scandal that has gripped France for a decade.

NonfictionTravelFood & Drink

A salute to the fabulous food of New Orleans

Review by Eve Zibart

Finally, a book on New Orleans restaurants that feels like summer in the city: gusty, alluring, oppressive, extravagant and intentionally over the top.

Eat Dat New Orleans is a love letter from ex-pat and food junkie Michael Murphy to one of the most complex and addictive cities in the world. While it covers some 250 restaurants, cafes and pop-ups, it’s anything but typical or predictable in tone.

Murphy, who spent 30 years with a variety of New York-based publishing firms, used to go to New Orleans regularly to visit authors, particularly culinary icons Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Hooked on the city’s culture, he threw himself and his wife a rockin’ destination wedding in New Orleans and moved there permanently in 2009. He has become, like most converts, the most zealous of disciples, and this highly personal but extensively researched book is like a food blog on steroids.

The restaurant profiles are, as he says, stories rather than critical reviews, as much anecdote as information. Murphy salutes the great waiters as well as chefs and owners. (This, of course, is how Southerners explain things: "You know who her people were . . .") The décor, the regular crowd, even the volume level get as much attention as the menu.

The title, for anyone who has managed to escape the ubiquity of NFL culture in America, is a reference to “Who Dat,” an old minstrel show phrase—something like the “Who’s on first?” of early jazz—that has become most closely associated, especially post-Katrina, with the beloved New Orleans Saints. It has an irresistible and characteristically New Orleans combination of underdog bravado and working class pride. (Not entirely coincidentally, one of the most striking local accents, called “Yat,” has a family resemblance to the famed Brooklyn/Jersey dialect, a reminder of the city’s immigrant and longshoremen builders. Though originally a mid-Westerner, Murphy calls himself a Pat-Yat.)

While Murphy is not shy about admitting a bias, and almost boasts of his lack of critical training, he has assembled a panel of backup experts, nine cookbook authors and journalists, to pick up any pieces and even to disagree with him. In fact, most of the prejudices in Eat Dat are laudable. Murphy acknowledges the tourist traps for their notable histories, and skewers some for what they aren’t anymore. Reluctantly but logically, he has imposed geographical boundaries on his book, sticking mostly to the areas within reach of tourists. However, his lists of “best-ofs” in the back cover a much broader spectrum.

The book was produced on a short schedule, and there are a few flatter, less engaging moments. The black-and-white photos by Rick Olivier, on the other hand, show great affection for the “real people” of New Orleans.

Murphy intends his book for out-of-towners and newcomers. However, a large number of “tourists” are there on convention business, and there are a few aspects of New Orleans dining that it would be nice to see a second edition address: handicapped access (always tricky in such historic structures), places comfortable for solo diners, especially women, lighting levels as well as volume, etc. The great bartenders and cocktail historians of the city, such as Chris McMillian, could get a little more credit. And I insist he mention the amazing collection of Mardi Gras costumes in the free upstairs museum at Arnaud’s Restaurant—air conditioning heaven in August.

Eve Zibart is a former restaurant critic for The Washington Post and the author of 10 books, including The Unofficial Guide to New Orleans.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a behind-the-book essay by Eat Dat New Orleans author Michael Murphy.

Finally, a book on New Orleans restaurants that feels like summer in the city: gusty, alluring, oppressive, extravagant and intentionally over the top. Eat Dat New Orleans is a love letter from ex-pat and food junkie Michael Murphy to one of the most complex and addictive cities in the world.
FictionHorror

Back to Dracula

Review by Eve Zibart

The month of Halloween brings us Dracula The Un-Dead, a bone-chilling sequel to the classic and the latest in the classic novel revisionist craze. This continuation of Bram Stoker’s Victorian thriller isn’t just family-sanctioned, it’s co-written by a family member. With the assistance of Ian Holt, a Dracula documentarian, historian and screenwriter, The Un-Dead was created by Dacre Stoker, the great-grandnephew of Bram, who claims parts of the novel are based on material cut from the original Dracula and Bram’s own notes.

The Un-Dead rejoins the band of friends and lovers who survived the original novel—Mina and Jonathan, Seward, Holmwood, even Van Helsing—now 25 years after the purported demise of Dracula. Over the years they have each faced disappointment and drifted apart, but they are brought back together when it appears that those who once hunted Dracula have now become the hunted. Someone—or something—is out to get them. Could it be that Dracula himself survived and is back for revenge, or might it be something even more sinister?

In a way, it seems likely that Dacre Stoker has been waiting his entire lifetime to resuscitate and reimagine the immortal prince. In The Un-Dead, Stoker and Holt have assembled an all-star cast highlighting the key players and events throughout history, weaving in Jack the Ripper, the Countess Bathory and her centuries-old rivalry with Vlad Tepes (the historical inspiration for Dracula), the burning of the Lyceum, the voyage of the Titanic and yes, even Bram Stoker himself. Indeed, the cameos and tributes—as clever and playful as they may be—are at times so numerous that they risk overwhelming the plot itself. Additionally, there are a few historical slips that will trip up vampire diehards, for example the erroneous statement that Vlad is short for Vladimir, rather than Vladislav, which was actually the historical prince’s real name.

Since Dracula is often viewed as a creature symbolizing lust and unquenched desire, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Un-Dead owes as much in tone to contemporary romance novels as to the post-Anne Rice vampire epics. The eroticism that merely coils beneath the surface of Dracula is overt here, complete with actual bodice-ripping. The violence is also more explicit, befitting a more modern audience, and ramps up throughout the course of the novel. At times it verges on gruesome, but thankfully touches of humor, however dark, manage to save these scenes and offer the appropriate respite. At one point in the novel, a man feels the strong urge to vomit upon realizing he has been gutted, but then of course he remembers that he (quite literally) no longer has the stomach for such action.

As for the prose itself, the initial attempt to capture the Victorian style of writing embodied in a letter from Mina to her son is a bit clunky; however readers who persevere through this experiment in writing will ultimately be rewarded with a breathless narrative rife with twists and turns. The writing is spirited, if not inspired, and the story will quickly capture readers’ interests and imaginations. The Un-Dead is a slow boil that eventually builds up a good deal of steam and ambient mist, although perhaps a “red fog” would be more apt. Apparently it’s true what they say: it’s hard to keep a good vampire down!

Eve Zibart was born on Halloween, and her license plate reads “vampyr.”

The month of Halloween brings us Dracula The Un-Dead, a bone-chilling sequel to the classic and the latest in the classic novel revisionist craze. This continuation of Bram Stoker’s Victorian thriller isn’t just family-sanctioned, it’s co-written by a family member. With the assistance of Ian Holt, a Dracula documentarian, historian and screenwriter, The Un-Dead was […]

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