THE MEMORY PALACE

A collector of “true short stories” parades 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. They come to him as some random fact or anecdote that finds a purchase in his imagination and are processed as stories. DiMeo, a former radio personality and artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is creator and host of The Memory Palace podcast and co-author of Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America. His first solo book engages deeply with history, locating new ways of perceiving lives familiar or obscure: how Samuel Morse invested 35 years learning to be a painter before tragedy compelled him to invent the code that bears his name; the legacy of Elizabeth Van Lew, aka Crazy Bet, a clever Southern iconoclast who spied for the Union in the Civil War; the strange history of Egypt’s Temple of Dendur; the rebuke to today’s anti-immigration forces embodied by the Jewish refugee ship St. Louis in World War II; the story of 19th-century farm wife turned artist Caroline Shawk Brooks, who sculpted masterworks in butter; and the inspiring career of Olympic runner Betty Robinson. Often DiMeo can only draw inferences from the facts at hand, but he is on surest footing when drawing on stories from his past, among the collection’s most fluid and emotionally resonant. The book’s anecdotal structure is reminiscent of, but superior to, the late Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story (1977), with its characteristic surprise or ironic endings. Although some of the writing can be pedestrian, there are flashes of eloquence and style. Stylistics, however, are beside the point.

DiMeo’s illumination of small wonders edifies and entertains.