Today I am continuing with my desire to publish blog entries which should have been published a long time ago. This is a blog entry about an author event that I should have published back then, but somehow, never quite got around to doing. This is my attempt to remedy that.
Better late than never, right?
Some years ago (we are rapidly approaching four years to the day, in fact), I took my son and Long Island to see one of my favorite authors. This was not the only thing that we did while in Long Island, although this author was one I had wanted to see for a long time, and this seemed to be a rare chance to finally see him.
The author is Erik Larson, who has written works that I have come to enjoy quite a bit. They are generally historical accounts, yet they read like novels (I mean it when I say that). That is not easy to do, and this man just has a gift for making events of the past come to life and feel like the present. It literally feels like you are revisiting the past, to a very different time and place that no longer feels very different or very long ago, thanks largely to his style of writing. It is like a brief escape or vacation, if you will, from our times and our present days lives, at least during the time it takes to read his works.
Larson is the author of “The Devil in the White City” and “In the Garden of Beasts,” both of which were terrific reads. In the first one, you feel like you are visiting Chicago late in the 19th century, when it was about to host a world's fair, and the beautiful "White City" was built, giving Chicago a very beautiful section reminiscent of some of the best of what the Old World has to offer, although this tragically was burnt down just a few years later, if memory serves correctly (except for one building, which survives). Simultaneously, we learn about H.H. Holmes, who became America's first serial killer, and who used the construction of the "White City" to lure people into his "castle" before ultimately killing them. The second book makes you feel like you are visiting Berlin (unseen) in the early days of the Third Reich, when a lot of the totality of the Nazi era were coming to be the norm. Again, you really do feel like you are, at least temporarily, leaving your own present day and circumstances while reading these books.
For this appearance, Larson was promoting and discussing his most recent work, “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.” This is one book that, admittedly I have not yet read. Obviously, it is about the sinking of the Lusitania, an event which finally got a reluctant United States into World War I. So far, I have heard largely good things about it.
If memory serves correctly, there were no photographs allowed for this event. However, I did take pictures of the little handbill, if you will, that they were handing out. Also, admittedly, I recall very little of the actual discussion. If memory serves correctly, it was a bit difficult to hear it, as the acoustics were not fantastic. Still, I was very happy to see him and hear the part of the discussion that I did manage to hear and, afterward, to get a few books signed (three, if memory serves correctly, including one for my son, even if he was too young at the time to realize the significance of it).
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