Friday 5ive- April 28, 2023

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly-ish post featuring five things that caught my attention this week. It's been more than a few weeks since my last Friday 5ive post, it's been a busy time for me between work and a week off to Florida.

1) Speaking of Florida, we had dear friends visit us and we made our first trip to the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. It was incredible! The highlight of the museum is a huge building where they have recreated a miniature circus setting from days gone by. Starting with the circus trains pulling into a train station, and through the set ups of dozens of tents, hundreds of animals, and thousands of miniature people, you walk around and see the amazing village the circus creates when it pulled into town. Whatever they need- from multiple barber shops, blacksmiths, carpenter shops, makeup and costume shops, performers' tents- they bring from town to town. It's truly a remarkable sight to see, I can't imagine how many hours went into creating this. We will be going back when we can spend more time there. 

The animals

Backstage- you can see the women's costumes on the left

Under the big top!

You can visit Ca'dZan, John & Mable Ringling's former mansion

2)  Spring is busting out all over the Upper East Side this week. It's so delightful to see all these bright flowers blooming. 

3) A few weeks back I saw Sweeney Todd on Broadway. Josh Groban plays wonderfully against his sunny personality as the demon barber of Fleet Street in this production, and Annaleigh Ashford gives her best performance on the stage yet as Mrs. Lovett, the owner of the meat pie establishment who loves Sweeney Todd and becomes the beneficiary of Sweeney Todd's revenge scheme. The show is a dark one in tone (obviously), and I had forgotten how many great songs came from this Stephen Sondheim creation- 'Johanna' (my favorite), 'Pretty Women' and 'Not While I'm Around' among them. Ruthie Anne Miles is brilliant as the Beggar Woman and Gaten Matarazzo as Tobias are also standouts in this great cast. I would bet on Ashford to win another Tony for her performance, one that the late great Angela Lansbury won a Tony for her iconic performance and later recreated in the movie. This one rates a must-see. 

4) We watched the new Netflix series The Diplomat in two sittings. If The West Wing and The Americans had a baby, it would be The Diplomat. Keri Russell (Felicity, The Americans) plays Katherine Wyler, a diplomat who is packing to return to the American embassy in Kabul to try and get Afghanistanis who helped the Americans get out safely. She is suddenly summoned to become the new American ambassador to the United Kingdom, a post that she is unprepared to take. She is having marital difficulties with her husband Hal, a man involved in government politics who likes to stir up trouble, including for his wife. When a British warship is hit in the Gulf and 41 sailors are killed, the Prime Minister wants to militarily retaliate against the Russians who evidence suggest is behind it. Katherine and the Foreign Minister of the UK team up to try and find out who was behind the bombing, and Katherine discovers the real reason she has been chosen for her new posting. The acting is fantastic, especially Russell and Rufus Sewell as Hal, and the storyline is timely and propulsive.  (I also like that Keri Russell looks like a woman in her forties, not a plastic faced doll.) I am proud that I was able to guess what was going to happen in the last ten minutes of the season finale and can't wait for season 2. Another highly recommended from us. 

5) I ended up reading three books with similiar themes- Dennis Lehane's Small Mercies and Don Winslow's City on Fire and the sequel City of Dreams. Dennis Lehane's novel is set in 1974 Boston at the beginning of the busing protests. Mary Pat Fennessy has lived in the Southie projects her whole life. Her first husband died, her second husband left her, her Vietnam vet son came back from war addicted to drugs and died of an overdose and now it's just her and her teenage daughter Jules. When Jules fails to come home one night, Mary Pat discovers that her daughter is involved with the gangsters from the Irish mob who run Southie. On the same night Jules disappears, a young Black man was killed by subway train, the son of a woman who works with Mary Pat at a nursing home. Mary Pat is fierce and determined to find out what happened to her daughter and if she has to break heads and cross the leader of the Irish mob (think Whitey Bulger) to do so, she will. Lehane drops the reader into 1974 Boston and the language and violence is authentic and disturbingly realistic. I remember seeing the busing story on the news every night as a teen and it comes off the page vividly in Small Mercies. I highly recommend it. 

Don Winslow's City on Fire tells the story of the Irish and Italian mobs in Providence, Rhode Island in the 1980s. They co-exist somewhat peacefully until a woman comes between two hotheaded men on either side. Danny Ryan is the protagonist, a midlevel man in the Irish mob who, although he does his best to avert a war that he knows one side will lose badly, ends up smack in the middle, with the FBI on their tail as well. Once again, the language and violence is constant and disturbing, but authentic. I couldn't read this book fast enough, it reminded me of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, and Winslow's analogies to Greek mythology begin each chapter. This series has streaming miniseries written all over it. This is another recommend from me. 

The second book in the series City of Dreams finds Danny and his crew on the run where they land in Hollywood. Danny finds himself a job as a consultant on a movie about the Providence mob wars and he becomes involved with the lead actress. The action is once again propulsive as Danny and his crew try to avoid the Italian mob coming for them. I liked the first half of the novel novel better than the second half, I wasn't totally on board with the choices Danny made. 

Have a safe, healthy week, until next time.

Three Great Titles for the End of Summer

Reprinted from auburnpub.com:

It’s hard to believe that summer is almost over. If you want to get in some good last minute reading before the leaves begin to change, this month’s Book Report has a few suggestions.

Don Winslow is best known for his crime thrillers, (“Cartel”) set on the West coast. His latest novel, “The Force” is set in New York City, and it is a propulsive, action-packed crime novel that will leave you breathless.

Denny Malone is the leader of the Manhattan North Special Task Force, known as “Da Force”. They are the alpha cops, the ones you see on the news, making big drug, gun and gang busts, putting the bad guys behind bars and making Northern Manhattan safer. “If there was a secret Da Force didn’t know about, it was because it hadn’t been whispered about or even thought about yet.” 

“Da Force” are supposed to be the good guys, but when the temptation of all that drug money and their desire to provide a good lives for their families collide, trouble follows. The novel opens with hero cop Malone behind bars himself in federal lockup with a big decision to make- protect his family or his partners.

The novel then tells how Malone got there, and it whips along at a breakneck pace. Winslow so submerges the reader into the grittier parts of Upper Manhattan, you actually feel like you’re right there along with him. And if you think only the cops are dirty, let’s just say that no one gets out of this unscathed.

Stephen King calls “The Force” “The Godfather, only with cops”, and that may be the best blurb I have ever read. It utterly describes the vibe you get from reading this heart-pounding book. Winslow dedicates this novel to the law enforcement personnel who lost their lives during the time he wrote the book, and names them all- the list is two and half pages and is a sobering beginning to this outstanding book, which I highly recommend.

Author Susan Elia MacNeal’s WWII heroine Maggie Hope returns in her seventh adventure in “The Paris Spy”. Maggie goes undercover working with the Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive in Paris during the German occupation. 

Her work is extremely dangerous, and when an agent who has valuable information about the pending Allied invasion is captured, Maggie and two of her colleagues must find that information and get it back to England, all while looking for the traitor in their midst.

Maggie must also deal with competing intelligence agencies who don’t trust each other, and she has a personal mission- find her missing sister, who was liberated from a concentration camp and hasn’t been seen since.

Maggie and her cohorts risk their lives, and there are many tense scenes in this outstanding entry in this historical mystery. At the end of the book, Maggie faces a troubling decision, one that will resonate in the next book, which I can’t wait to read.

MacNeal does impeccable research for her novels, and “The Paris Spy” is no different. She includes an Historical Notes section at the end, which is fascinating to any WWII history buff, and she gives the reader a list of books she consulted, in case you want to continue your own historical reading.

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” may put people in mind of Elizabeth Taylor. Evelyn Hugo was a glamorous movie star during the glory days of Hollywood, beloved by millions and married to seven men. She has been out of the limelight for years, and an interview with her is coveted by many people. 

Only Hugo knows why she chose a relatively unknown reporter to secretly write her biography, each chapter about one of her seven husbands. Throughout the story, we find out that the love of Hugo’s life was not one of her husbands, but a complete surprise, a relationship she kept hidden from the public out of fear.

The characters in this fascinating novel are so well-drawn, particularly Hugo herself. She is a larger-than-life movie star and she jumps off the page as she tells her amazing story. It reminded me of Adriana Trigiani’s “All The Stars In The Heavens”, and if you are a Turner Classics Movie fan, “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” is a must-read. It’s a heartbreaker.

“The Force” by Don Winslow- A+

Published by WilliamMorrow

Hardcover, $27.99, 482 pages

“The Paris Spy” by Susan Elia MacNeal- A+

Published by Bantam

Hardcover, $26, 301 pages

“The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”- A

Published by Washington Square Press

Hardcover, $26, 400 pages