London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for the Truth has been getting a lot of attention, most of it, here in the States, very positive. Reviewing the book in The Spectator, Philip Hensher, wrote that it tells an unnecessarily long story about a far from epic event. “It has,” Hensher writes, “the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book.”
The sentence seemed to beautifully describe a good number of nonfiction books.
The time it takes, while listening to the radio or watching TV, to hear an example of bad grammar is still longer than the time it takes, when behind the wheel, to witness an example of bad driving.
On our way to Key West last week we spent two nights in Islamorada, timing our visit to coincide with the monthly Morada Way Art Walk, which I had stumbled upon in 2018 while researching a story about recovery after Hurricane Irma. It is a lovely event: booths selling baked goods, jewelry, and art; people strolling with children and dogs; musicians stationed at various points. Getting off the main street, we passed under shade trees to find cottage galleries, including that of Taylor Hale, a talented local artist whose paintings of sea and clouds – those spectacular Florida skyscapes – filled the walls. The path led us to the beer garden of the Florida Keys Brewing Co., where I bought an IPA and then ordered fish tacos from the neighboring food truck. The tacos were delivered to our picnic table a few minutes later. They went beautifully with my beer.
It had been two years since our last trip to Key West, so we returned to favorite haunts – Blue Heaven, Café Sole – and in both places we had the same Polish servers we had had two years ago. This was heartening, as I wrote about the Poles of Key West in an essay “A Susurration of Palms,” that appeared in the anthology Key West Sketches: Writers at Mile Zero. Even more heartening was finding the book, published three years ago, prominently displayed in both of the town’s bookstores.
Tomorrow morning I’m heading down to Miami Beach for Seatrade (the cruise industry’s largest annual gathering) and Wednesday morning we’re leaving for five days in the Keys, so this morning I’m putting a few days’ worth of posts in one.
Watching the splashdown of Artemis II on Friday, I thought of the evening in Perpignan, in 1975, when, walking with some French people, I was asked if I felt proud when I looked at the moon. The question caught me by surprise. I didn’t respond, though I should have, that Neil Armstrong had called it a “giant leap for mankind” – not a giant leap for America. Yet, watching the TV on Friday, I did feel some national pride, probably because Trump incites the opposite feeling.
Saturday we went to GableStage for its production of A Prayer for the French Republic. Gaul again. But the play is as much about global antisemitism as it is about the French version. It is an excellent if unnecessarily long play (at three and a half hours), yet because it’s in English, and the actors are all American, speaking with American accents, it was hard to think of the characters as French. Perhaps that’s the point.
And yesterday, showing some friends around Miami (a two-Miami weekend), we heard that in Hungary, Viktor Orban had lost to Peter Magyar (Peter Hungary). And like that, the pariah of the EU (except in the eyes of American conservatives) became its darling.
I'll be back here in a week.
Last week’s Spectator published a letter to the editor that began: “I’m not a Conservative voter but I am a longtime Spectator reader and enjoy the articles even when – and often because – I disagree with them.” That described me perfectly and seemed to provide proof of the magazine’s liveliness and wit.