{"product_id":"the-memory-palace-isbn-9780593446164","title":"The Memory Palace","description":"\u003cb\u003eIncredible true stories reveal strange new magic in American history in this wondrous first book from the creator of the award-winning podcast \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Nate DiMeo zooms in on stories of mishap, invention and adventure. . . . These brief historical lessons read like exquisite short stories, each of them revealing something profound about history and humanity.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace\u003c\/i\u003e is a collection of crystalline historical tales that read like luminous short fiction and, like Nate DiMeo’s acclaimed podcast of the same name, conjure lost moments and forgotten figures who are calling out across time to be remembered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSpace capsules filled with fruit flies and future senators. A socialite scientist who gives up her glamorous life to follow love and the elusive prairie chicken. A boy genius on a path to change the world who gets lost in the theoretical possibilities of streetcar transfers. An enslaved man who steals a boat and charts a course that leads him to freedom, war, and Congress. A farmer’s wife who puts down her butter churn, picks up the butter, and becomes an international art star. An amusement park glowing at the water’s edge when electric lights are a brand-new thing. This cabinet of curiosities teems with wonder.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor fifteen years, Nate DiMeo has turned to the past to make sense of the way we live today, finding beauty and meaning in history’s dustier corners, holding things up to the light and weaving facts, keen insight, wit, and poignant observation into unforgettable tales. With new stories and treasured favorites from the beloved podcast assembled alongside dynamic illustrations and archival photographs for the first time, enchantment awaits you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“One doesn’t often find the words imagination and history in the same sentence. Nate DiMeo has forever woven them together. \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace\u003c\/i\u003e wants you to linger, to stay awhile, and find a deeper meaning both in the stories of the past and perhaps in your own life as well.”—Ken Burns\u003c\/b\u003e“One doesn’t often find the words \u003ci\u003eimagination\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003ehistory \u003c\/i\u003ein the same sentence. Nate DiMeo has forever woven them together. He asks each of us to engage in an act of empathetic imagination, to see in the stories of others—people who lived before us—something inherently human, something that transcends time and provides us with a feeling of understanding and, quite often, joy. \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Place\u003c\/i\u003e wants you to linger, to stay awhile, and find a deeper meaning both in the stories of the past and perhaps in your own life as well.”\u003cb\u003e—Ken Burns, filmmaker\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nate DiMeo delves through history with a poet’s eye, recovering the strange and revealing and even wonderful detritus of our past and reflecting on it in profound ways. \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace\u003c\/i\u003e is a beautiful, moving, and often funny book made out of our collective history and DiMeo’s unique sensibility.”\u003cb\u003e—Phil Klay, National Book Award–winning author of \u003ci\u003eMissionaries\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nate DiMeo zooms in on stories of mishap, invention and adventure in these pithy yet profound historical lessons. . . . These brief historical lessons read like exquisite short stories, each of them revealing something profound about history and humanity.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“History lovers will surely enjoy these bite-sized narratives of historical moments both big and small.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Library Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nate DiMeo has an uncanny ability to describe these small, beautiful moments in history that will delight your curiosity, elucidate our shared humanity, and maybe even break your heart. The short, perfect stories of \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace\u003c\/i\u003e will stick with you.”\u003cb\u003e—Roman Mars, author of \u003ci\u003eThe 99% Invisible City\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I love Nate DiMeo’s singular gift for uncovering small stories about very big things. \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace\u003c\/i\u003e is like an impeccably curated museum of humanity, shown in all its weird, sad, gleeful, and idiosyncratic glory.”\u003cb\u003e—Jon Mooallem, author of \u003ci\u003eSerious Face\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The only problem with \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace—\u003c\/i\u003ean incredible book, executed beautifully—is that for months after you read it you will repeat the stories to everyone you meet, everywhere you go. Nate DiMeo has magically curated American history and unearthed dozens of incredible stories, every one a pure delight, and written about them the way only he can—with humor, passion, and poetry. This is a book everyone in your life will love and cherish.”\u003cb\u003e—Michael Schur, author of \u003ci\u003eHow to Be Perfect\u003c\/i\u003e and creator of \u003ci\u003eThe Good Place\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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. . . . DiMeo’s illumination of small wonders edifies and entertains.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Kirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Readers will feel a shiver of recognition and understanding—making a second or third visit to DiMeo’s memory palace both irresistible and gratifying.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—BookPage\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A charming array of underknown stories about people, animals, and objects, and their effect on the zeitgeist . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Booklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eNate DiMeo\u003c\/b\u003e is the creator and host of \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace, \u003c\/i\u003ea Peabody Award finalist and among the first group of podcasts preserved by the Library of Congress. He was previously the artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he has performed stories from \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace \u003c\/i\u003elive with music, pictures, and animation all over the United States and Canada, as well as in England, Ireland, and Australia. DiMeo is the co-author of \u003ci\u003ePawnee: The Greatest Town in America\u003c\/i\u003e , a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Prior to producing \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Palace\u003c\/i\u003e, DiMeo spent a decade in public radio and could be heard on \u003ci\u003eAll Things Considered\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMorning Edition\u003c\/i\u003e, or \u003ci\u003eMarketplace\u003c\/i\u003e. He has written for NBC’s \u003ci\u003eParks and Recreation\u003c\/i\u003e and ABC’s \u003ci\u003eThe Astronaut Wives Club\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cb\u003eDistance\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSamuel Finley Breese Morse spent the first thirty-five years of his life learning to paint. At Andover, at Yale, in London at the Royal Academy of Arts. He studied the work of the masters. To learn how Michelangelo built bodies that seemed to pulse and shudder out of mere oil and shadow and crosshatch. To learn how Raphael summoned the spark of inner life with a single stroke of pure white in the dusky ocher of a noblewoman’s eye. To learn how to create illusions of space and distance. To learn how to conjure the ineffable through the mere aggregation of lines and dots on stretched canvas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1825, Morse was living in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Lucretia, and two sons, with a third child due any day now, when a courier delivered a message. The city of New York wanted to pay him a thousand dollars to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette. The hero of the revolution was coming to Washington to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war and he would sit for Morse, if the painter could leave right away. Morse packed his easel and his brushes and his paints, and clothes good enough to wear when meeting a great man of the age, and kissed his pregnant wife, and left that night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA week later, Morse was in his rented studio in Washington, preparing it for the arrival of his distinguished subject the next morning, when he heard a knock on his door. Another courier, this one breathless and dirty from a hard ride on a hard road, handed him a note, five words long: “Your dear wife is convalescent.” Morse left for home that night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe rode for six days on horseback and in the backs of juddering wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold wind of the October night, and when he made it to New Haven and ran through fallen leaves up to the house on Whitney Avenue, he learned that his wife was dead. In fact, she had died before the courier knocked on his door. In fact, she had already been buried, one morning while he was on the road. While he was racing home to be by her side. Thinking she was getting better.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSamuel Finley Breese Morse spent the next forty-five years of his life trying to make sure no one would have to feel what he felt that night ever again. He spent the next forty-five years inventing the telegraph, to turn real space and real distance into an illusion, and inventing a code: dots and lines that could transmit the stuff of life and of dying wives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGigantic\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe first set foot on America in November of 1795. We know this. It says so in the logbook of a trading ship called America which set sail from Calcutta a month later. We know that the ship’s captain paid $450 for her, a big investment. Add to that figure the cost of food and of revenue lost by taking up space that could have been stocked with barrels of spices and bolts of fabric and other nonperishable things, instead of using it to transport a live elephant.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe captain had big plans for her. We know this, too, from letters he wrote to his four brothers. He thought people would flip out about an elephant back home. There had never been an elephant anywhere on the continent of North America. He figured that had to be worth more than a crate of cardamom or Darjeeling tea. He bet he could turn his four hundred and fifty bucks into five thousand, easy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe don’t know if he did. The historical record loses track of the elephant after a while. Newspapers tell us she drew crowds in New York right after America returned to America. She stood tied to a stake at the corner of Broadway and Beaver, downtown. People paid to see her stand there. We also know that the captain brought her down south when winter came, to get her out of the northern cold; the Carolinas were as close to India as he could offer. After that we don’t really know what happened to her, for a while. But we do know about Hachaliah Bailey.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHachaliah Bailey’s family owned a farm in Somers, New York, now a bedroom community an hour and change from Manhattan on the Metro-North commuter line. In his early thirties, Hachaliah worked as a drover, bringing cattle into the city, such as it was at the start of the nineteenth century (it was a longer trip then). At some point during one of his cattle drives, Hachaliah became enthralled with one of the animals that lived at the stockyard in Manhattan. He’d talk about her all the time when he was home, and he’d go to see her every time he came to town. We don’t know how she came to live with the cattle and pigs and sheep and goats, or how long she lived there, but we know that, around 1807, Hachaliah Bailey bought an Indian elephant for one thousand dollars and brought her home to live on his farm in Somers. He called her Betty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHachaliah had never liked farming. It took forever for things to grow. It took forever to plow a field with a team of mules. But with an elephant? He ought to be able to cut that time in half.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe don’t know how well that went. What we do know is that an Indian elephant in rural America draws a crowd, especially in 1807, and Hachaliah Bailey soon figured out that there was more money to be made by drawing a crowd than by increasing agricultural output through elephant-based efficiencies. So Hachaliah Bailey and the elephant he now affectionately called Old Bet hit the road.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the better part of a decade, the pair toured the Northeast, commandeering town squares and barns and charging admission. Eventually, Bailey expanded the operation, turning it into a full-on traveling circus. He added a horse and a dog and a goat, which everybody had, but an elephant? No one had an elephant.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere were farmers and coopers and their wives and their neighbors. Here were people who hadn’t left their fields or their towns since they’d first immigrated or since they’d gotten back from the war. Here were children who’d never been anywhere, never seen anything, beyond the world of their farm and their neighbors and their woods past the wall of stones their grandfather had laid. And into that world walks this creature. Into that world walks the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe don’t know how much money Hachaliah Bailey made off Old Bet. We know there were times when the two of them would roll into a town and people couldn’t scrounge up even a little money, so they’d trade him farm tools and booze for a peek at the pachyderm. And we read, though we’re not sure we entirely believe, that the Indian elephant developed a taste for Jamaican rum. We know Hachaliah Bailey started walking her from town to town in the middle of the night so people wouldn’t get a free look along the way. We know he was successful enough to sell two shares of Old Bet for twelve hundred dollars apiece. We know those things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd we know, and are sad to report, that Old Bet died in Alfred, Maine, in 1816. She was shot by a farmer who felt it was a sin to charge people to see an animal. We don’t, of course, know how Old Bet felt about anything.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut there are some things we do know\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn Indian elephant in the wild can live up to seventy years. Evolution has made them fundamentally social animals. They eat, they breed, they find water, and they protect themselves and their young and one another from predators by working as a group. We know they communicate through body language, by secreting bodily fluids with decipherable odors, and by growling and stamping and trumpeting and shrieking and emitting sounds at frequencies so low they can’t be heard by humans, but which vibrate through the ground to be picked up by other elephants as far away as six miles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe know, too, that their social order, and group and individual survival, hinge on their famous memories. Researchers have seen elephants, reunited after twenty-six years, signal that they recognize one another as family, and all elephants can remember and recognize as many as two hundred individual elephants.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo which did she remember?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhich did she look for among the cattle and hogs of the Manhattan stockyards?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd to which elephants did she send subsonic messages to radiate out through New England soil, only to fall seven thousand miles short?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat did she remember?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf the ship’s hold?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd the salt air of the Indian Ocean?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd the Cape of Good Hope?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd the mouth of the Hudson?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf the countless days spent tied to a stake?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf the green hills of North Carolina?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf the faces in crowds?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf the nights spent walking under stars, and quarter moons, and North American elms?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn her way to yet another strange place with no elephants.Creator of the award-winning podcast","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233712681189,"sku":"NP9780593446164","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593446164.jpg?v=1767740472","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-memory-palace-isbn-9780593446164","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}