Books!

I just finished The Lost City of Z, which is a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. It's the story of Percy Fawcett, a famous Amazonian explorer who disappeared, with his son, on an expedition into the Amazon in 1925. ( Z )

I finished this at work on a day when I hadn't brought a backup book (there were about fifty pages of notes, so I didn't realize how near I was to the end). Lack of book is not a problem at my office, so I picked up one I thought would hold me til I got home: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.

George Washington Plunkitt was a politicdian in New York's notoriously corrupt political machine, Tammany Hall. This book (only 90 pages long) is a bunch of essays of his, originally published in 1905. And by "essays" I mean extemporaneous speeches he gave from a boot black stand to a reporter. The first one is called "Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft."

( Hundred-year-old political tracts can be dead fascinating, I swear )

I just have to quote some of these things, because they are hilarious:

"A Brooklynite is a natural-born hayseed, and can never become a real New Yorker. He can't be trained into it. Consolidation didn't make him a New Yorker, and nothin' on earth can....And why? Because Brooklyn don't seem to be like any other place on earth. Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn's cobblestones, with the odor of Newton Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there's no place in the world for him except Brooklyn."

[on state supreme court nominations] "Now I ain't sayin' that we sell nominations. That's a different thing altogether. There's no auction and no regular biddin'. The man is picked out and somehow he gets to understand what's expected of him in the way of a contribution, and he ponies up--all from gratitude to the organization that honored him, see?"

"There's only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature and act accordin'. You can't study human nature in books. Books is a hindrance more than anything else. If you have been to college, so much the worse for you. You'll have to unlearn all you learned before you can get right down to human nature...What tells in holdin' your grip on your district is to go right down among the poor families and help them in the different ways they need help....It's philanthropy, but it's politics, too--mighty good politics."