The Memory Palace

June 1, 2024

DiMeo, the creator and host of The Memory Palace podcast and coauthor of Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America, which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize, offers a collection of stories from history. In addition to the stories, the work is particularly designed to showcase images as well. Prepub Alert.

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October 1, 2024
DiMeo, creator of the podcast this book is named after, compiles a charming array of underknown stories about people, animals, and objects, and their effect on the zeitgeist. Portrait painter Samuel Morse's life was forever altered when the slow speed of early nineteenth-century communication kept him from attending to his dying wife. Afterwards, he worked for decades to invent the telegram. Thomas Midgeley went from being a baseball fan who studied the spitball to inventing leaded gasoline and freon, both of which brought short-term success with long-term consequences. DiMeo outlines the history of the Temple of Dendur, which, after being gifted to the U.S. as a thank-you from Egypt, found a home at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art--and later, infamy, when its sponsor, the Sackler family, fell from grace. The Memory Palace is a wonderful collection of historical vignettes portraying fateful moments in time with often-enduring consequences. DiMeo's flair for the short history is evident, and his book is ceaselessly entertaining.

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November 1, 2024
A collector of "true short stories" parades a caravan of curiosities. In mining "the space between the story of our lives and those lives as we live them," DiMeo plays magician, conjuring the enchantments that reside in the subtle and unseen, often moment to moment. They come to him as some random fact or anecdote that finds a purchase in his imagination and are processed as stories. DiMeo, a former radio personality and artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is creator and host ofThe Memory Palace podcast and co-author ofPawnee: The Greatest Town in America. His first solo book engages deeply with history, locating new ways of perceiving lives familiar or obscure: how Samuel Morse invested 35 years learning to be a painter before tragedy compelled him to invent the code that bears his name; the legacy of Elizabeth Van Lew, aka Crazy Bet, a clever Southern iconoclast who spied for the Union in the Civil War; the strange history of Egypt's Temple of Dendur; the rebuke to today's anti-immigration forces embodied by the Jewish refugee shipSt. Louis in World War II; the story of 19th-century farm wife turned artist Caroline Shawk Brooks, who sculpted masterworks in butter; and the inspiring career of Olympic runner Betty Robinson. Often DiMeo can only draw inferences from the facts at hand, but he is on surest footing when drawing on stories fromhis past, among the collection's most fluid and emotionally resonant. The book's anecdotal structure is reminiscent of, but superior to, the late Paul Harvey'sThe Rest of the Story (1977), with its characteristic surprise or ironic endings. Although some of the writing can be pedestrian, there are flashes of eloquence and style. Stylistics, however, are beside the point. DiMeo's illumination of small wonders edifies and entertains.

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