Nonfiction Review: Mobituaries, by Mo Rocca (audiobook)

 

Title: Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving

Author: Mo Rocca (read by the author)

Publication Info: Simon and Schuster Audio, 2019. Hardback, Simon and Schuster, 2019, 384 pages. 

Source: Library digital resources 

Publisher's Blurb: 

Mo Rocca has always loved obituaries—reading about the remarkable lives of global leaders, Hollywood heavyweights, and innovators who changed the world. But not every notable life has gotten the send-off it deserves. His quest to right that wrong inspired Mobituaries, his #1 hit podcast. Now with Mobituaries, the book, he has gone much further, with all new essays on artists, entertainers, sports stars, political pioneers, founding fathers, and more. Even if you know the names, you’ve never understood why they matter...until now.

Take Herbert Hoover: before he was president, he was the “Great Humanitarian,” the man who saved tens of millions from starvation. But after less than a year in the White House, the stock market crashed, and all the good he had done seemed to be forgotten. Then there’s Marlene Dietrich, well remembered as a screen goddess, less remembered as a great patriot. Alongside American servicemen on the front lines during World War II, she risked her life to help defeat the Nazis of her native Germany. And what about Billy Carter and history’s unruly presidential brothers? Were they ne’er-do-well liabilities…or secret weapons? Plus, Mobits for dead sports teams, dead countries, the dearly departed station wagon, and dragons. Yes, dragons.

Rocca is an expert researcher and storyteller. He draws on these skills here. With his dogged reporting and trademark wit, Rocca brings these men and women back to life like no one else can. Mobituaries is an insightful and unconventional account of the people who made life worth living for the rest of us, one that asks us to think about who gets remembered, and why. 

My Review:

By the time you get through that blurb, I'm not sure how much there is left for me to say, except that the last paragraph of the blurb is pretty much spot on. I found the stories interesting and his delivery excellent (as you'd expect from a performer). I learned a bunch of things (I didn't know that about Herbert Hoover, who went on to be the president who got the blame for the Great Depression--remember "Hoovervilles"?), and enjoyed doing it.

Pretty much the only thing I found to complain about were some sections where he follows a well-developed story about one person or entity with a series of basically one-line similar cases. I wanted to know more about most of those!

My Recommendation:

This was great listening while driving, and the relatively short segments would also work well for times when you don't want to commit to a whole book at once. Check it out for some enjoyable, not too ponderous, bits of biography and history!

FTC Disclosure: I checked Mobituaries out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising." 

IWSG: The best month for writing?

 

It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group post. The IWSG is the brainchild of the amazing Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh. Since we are all insecure and can use all the support we can get, huge thanks to Alex and this month's co-hosts,
Pat Garcia, Sylvia Ney, Liesbet @ Roaming About Cathrina Constantine, and Natalie Aguirre!

 

Each month we have an optional question to spark discussion. 

This month's Optional Question: are there months or times of the year when you are more productive than others, and why?

Let me know what you think!

I think this is the flip side of the question about when it is hard to write, or what makes it hard. I've commented in the past that travel/vacations mess with my ability to write regularly, since there tends not to be a lot of down time, and a lot of distractions. Aside from the obvious corollary that writing happens more when I'm at home, I'm not sure when I write best. The truth is that I don't really know what life looks like going forward, so I might not be able to give a reasonable answer to this question.

But: in the past, my most productive writing times have been ones without travel, and usually with the extra incentives that NaNo offers. By incentives, I mean both the gimmicky things like the histograms showing progress toward the utterly arbitrary 50,000 words, and the community of writers who are all doing the same thing, and offering support and encouragement to each other. So November, despite the holiday distractions, has been a productive month for me in many years. This year I'm hoping to be ready to start a new novel in January or February, and to dive in hard and fast, NaNo-style, once I'm set.

 #

The Writing Report: Unlike other Novembers when I've had a novel going, this year I was just editing and organizing old stories into collections, and when I took off to spend Thanksgiving with a small corner of my family, progress on that ground pretty much to a halt. The project just didn't have the sense of urgency drafting a novel does. Still, I need and want to finish the collections, so I'll be ready to get back to Death By Donut as soon as my beta readers are done with it. So I guess I'd best get cracking! 

 

Non-Fiction Review: Rebel Cinderella

 

Title: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes

Author: Adam Hochschild. Read by Lisa Flanagan

Publishing Info: HMH Audio, 2020. Original, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 320 pages.

Publisher's Blurb: 

Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had worked in cigar factories since the age of eleven. Two years later, she captured headlines across the globe when she married James Graham Phelps Stokes, scion of one of the legendary 400 families of New York high society. Together, this unusual couple joined the burgeoning Socialist Party and, over the next dozen years, moved among the liveliest group of activists and dreamers this country has ever seen. Their friends and houseguests included Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Rose stirred audiences to tears and led strikes of restaurant waiters and garment workers. She campaigned alongside the country’s earliest feminists to publicly defy laws against distributing information about birth control, earning her notoriety as “one of the dangerous influences of the country” from President Woodrow Wilson. But in a way no one foresaw, her too-short life would end in the same abject poverty with which it began.

By a master of narrative nonfiction, Rebel Cinderella unearths the rich, overlooked life of a social justice campaigner who was truly ahead of her time. 

My Review:

I found this a fascinating look into a bit of American history that doesn't get talked about much in your school classes. The story of Rose Pastor Stokes' life is pretty amazing, but for me the real value of the book lies in the context, which is pretty well presented. In essence, the story becomes the history of socialism in America, with the pluses and negatives of both sides--socialism and the fierce anti-socialist--clearly expressed.

Actually, I would say that the author is fairly sympathetic to the cause of socialism, while reporting the ways in which the movement went off track. The Russian Revolution clearly presented a special challenge to the movement, though it was WWI that truly derailed the socialist cause.

The character of Rose Pastor Stokes is interesting, and it is clear that her work with the union movement, rights for workers, and the need for safe working conditions was significant (and, as usual, overlooked in the history we studied in school). The narration by Lisa Flanagan was professional and transparent--it doesn't make the book, but nor does it mar it. 

My Recommendation:

This is well worth a read to understand more fully the history of socialism, and the goals of same. It's worth knowing the extremes our nation went to to suppress socialist views, which were considered inimical to the war effort, during and after WWI.

FTC Disclosure: I checked Rebel Cinderella out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."