Reader’s Diary

Mark Svenvold

In 1976 a worker preparing a fun house for the filming of an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man” discovered that a dummy was really a mummy. The dessicated, orange-painted body turned out to be that of Elmer McCurdy, a luckless outlaw who died in 1911.

McCurdy was no Jesse James. He’s only known to have committed three crimes. In his first attempt at larceny he had to blast an express car safe four times before it popped open to reveal that the heat of the blasting had welded the silver to the interior of the safe, rendering it immovable. In his second, he destroyed the inside of a bank but failed to open the vault. In his final robbery he picked the wrong train, leading to a haul of less than $50 and a subsequent fatal shootout in Oklahoma.

After his death a local undertaker kept his body - embalmed with arsenic - on display. A few years later a pair of men claiming to be McCurdy’s relatives showed up to claim the body. They were really carnies and McCurdy was soon on the road. After a long career in show business he ended up in the L.A. fun house; after the grisly discovery in 1976, history-loving citizens from Guthrie, Oklahoma buried him, not incidentally getting some national publicity for their town.

Svenvold tells this tale well, seasoning it with interesting material about everything from forensics to carnivals to horror movie fan conventions.

Michael Ruhlman

In the first section of “Soul of a Chef”, Michael Ruhlman returns to the Culinary Institute of American, scene of his excellent “The Making of a Chef“. This time he’s not learning to be a chef, but observing the impossibly demanding Certified Master Chef certification test. He covers the test tells the stories of the candidates. This isn’t a cooking contest, it’s more like a Navy SEAL tryout. Perfection is demanded,and some candidates drop out before finishing the multi-day test.

The rest of the book consists of profiles of two chefs, one a California perfectionist, the other a somewhat looser but still driven Ohioan. Ruhlman writes in first-person and includes stories of his own experiences in restaurant kitchens. The high standard these guys hold themselves is inspirational. The amount of work they do is amazing; there are certainly easier ways to make a living.

This books has two of the marks of a good non-fiction book: it holds your interest even if you don’t have a deep interest in the subject, and it shows you a world you weren’t aware of.

Steven Sherrill

History (mythology, anyway) tells us that Theseus killed the Minotaur. But what if the Minotaur took a fall and lived on? And on and on, until he found himself cooking in a restaurant in the rural South, circa 1990? This is the question that Steven Sherrill answers, Bradbury-like, in “The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break”.

The Minotaur drives a Vega, fixes cars (the horns do get in the way), and lives in a trailer park. He can talk, but it’s hard for him to make the words come out right, so he grunts a lot. He’s a good worker, with a few centuries of experience as a cook. His neighbors and coworkers like him. But he’s lonely. And then he falls in love.

Weird, yes, but the book is charming too. Everything but the main character is completely normal. If he were a man, it’d still be a good book about a cook and his troubles. Sherrill could have written it about a mute, or a mildly retarded man, and it would have been much the same story. But then I would never have noticed it on the shelf, and I wouldn’t have the picture in my head of a man with a bull’s head carving roast in a Southern supper club.

Ben Mezrich

If you took a bunch of MIT students - smart young men and women who didn’t look like card counters - trained them to play blackjack according to strict rules, and set them loose on Las Vegas, could you beat the house? According to “Bringing Down the House” you not only could, but it’s been done. The key was rigid adherence to card counting strategies coupled with team play - the use of low-roller spotters who signal to high-roller players when the count is right.

“Bringing Down the House” is the story of the MIT team centered around the experiences of one player, Kevin Lewis, from his initiation into the team to the end of the team’s run. For end it did, brought to a conclusion by high-tech casino surveillance and a surprisingly high degree of cooperation among casino security forces.

This is Mezrich’s first non-fiction book. Though he brings a novelist’s sense of timing to this work, he should have left the tired cliches behind. Also, I wish he would have had the journalistic ability to get the other (casino) side of the story. Despite its faults, this is a good read. (For a better-written account of a similar venture, see “The Eudaemonic Pie” by Thomas A. Bass.)

April 3, 2008 update: With the release of the movie version of the book, at there are reports (here, here, and here) that Mezrich’s account was highly embellished.

Albert DeMeo

Albert DeMeo writes about an almost idyllic suburban childhood in a comfortable middle class household headed by a loving father. There was only one catch: that loving father was mobster Roy DeMeo, a “made” Mafia man. As Roy climbs the ranks the pressures that come with new job responsibilities affect his home life and ultimately lead to his death.

Even before he was a teenager, Albert was his father’s confidant and slowly grew to realize the nature of his dad’s job. He doesn’t admit to any crimes of his own, but he writes with an insider’s knowledge of Mafia culture.

This is a unique book, fascinating both for it’s portrayal of the mob and for Albert’s personal story. It’s the memoir of a young man caught between love for his father and horror over what his father was.

Comparisons with “The Sopranos” are inevitable, but this is a much more chilling story, not least because it’s true.

Stephen Frey

Augustus McKnight is an unhappy salesman who dreams of making it big in the stock market. When one of his investments nets him a nice return he sets out on a career as a day trader. His wife is murdered and, naturally, he’s a suspect. In trying to prove his innocence he discovers that nothing about his life - or his wife - is or was what it seemed.

This is a good story; a page turner with some surprising plot twists. Its portrayal of the world of the small time day trader is interesting. The characters may be a bit implausible, but that didn’t keep me from enjoying the book.