As delightful as the podcast, which is saying something. Nate's style shines through, gently guiding readers down paths that are as entertaining as they are intriguing and thought-provoking.

This collection of historical tales, inspired by a popular podcast, brings forgotten figures and moments to life, offering insightful and beautifully written short stories that connect the past to the present.

I loved this. The stories are heartwarming, poignant, and inspiring.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

I have long listened to a loved Nate DiMeo's The Memory Palace podcast, and was equally delighted by the book. I encourage anyone who has never listened to the show before to go to the feed and pick an episode title that looks interesting. If you would like I recommendation, search for "Butterflies", which also appears in the book. Listening to the episode will introduce you to DiMeo's trademark soft voice and distinct cadence, as well as the dark humor he employs when tackling certain topics.

Each essay in the collection is a short reflection of some curiosity from America's history. DiMeo has a few favorite topics that he likes to return to often, such as athletes and artists and freed slaves, but the variety and tone of the stories is a buffet and DiMeo invites readers to dip in wherever the vibes lead them. Some of my favorite stories from the collection include:

"New England Granite", in which the history of the ridiculousness of Plymouth Rock is traced,

the freed slaves stories of "Hercules" and "The Wheel",

and the action-adventure of "Natural Habitat".

If history is a subject that bored you in school, I beg you to read a few of these essays and give DiMeo a chance to show you how people of the past were people like you and I today. He isn't going to talk at you about boring battles unless those battles are part of someone's story. There's lots of art. Stories about animals. A spy. A con man. DiMeo is a skilled storyteller, and this collection illuminates small treasures from our history.

***A big thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this upcoming book***
What an absolute gem of a book this is! I had never heard of the podcast that shares the name of this book, but historical short stories sounded right up my alley and had I was intrigued right off the bat. Who knew that there were so few degrees of separation from Baby Ruth candy bars to the pilot who flew the Enola Gay and dropped the atomic bomb?

Each story focuses on lesser known historical figures and lesser known stories about some of the most famous people of all time. The author even provides some personal stories towards the end of the book that were touching and some of them were surprising….wait until you read the crazy family history of one of his school friends. The stories are all well written and you’ll find yourself trying to squeeze in another story before you have to go to sleep or have to put the book down. I can’t recommend this book enough! It will be a perfect read for all hardcore history buffs and people who just like reading a great true story.

"Incredible true stories reveal strange new magic in American history in this wondrous first book from the creator of the award-winning podcast The Memory Palace.

The Memory Palace 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.

Space 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.

For 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."

Because everything needs to be remembered. And it's often the stories we overlook that might be the most fascinating.

a wonderful recreation of nate dimeo’s magical podcast. i’ve been a faithful listener since 2014, one of three of the first podcasts i ever started and the only one to persist. i have heard book updates on episodes here and there and finally: here it is! i recommend listening, but this book delivers as well.

many thanks to random house publishing group and netgalley for the advance reader copy.

I love the Memory Palace podcast. I loved it when I first heard it more than a decade ago (!?). “Giants in Those Days” was the first episode I heard, on a road trip, heavily pregnant and driving to New Orleans for one last vacation together before the kiddo came. It was an apt introduction, since Nate DiMeo’s brief, lyrically written and beautifully scored stories that have the vivid specificity of roadside attractions. So I was excited to hear that DiMeo had a book coming out based on the podcast. It’s releasing in November, but I just finished reading a digital advanced review copy through NetGalley. I thought I’d briefly interrupt my Hippodrome stories to share my thoughts about it.

To be honest, it’s still relevant to the blog as a whole since the Hippodrome also belongs within the purview of “Old Timey Americana Studies.” This a field that DiMeo explores with great empathy and an eye for the telling detail, telling brief and evocative stories that bounce across times and places but mostly do focus on the United States. The scope can sometimes be dizzying: one sample from the middle of the book goes from California in 1966 to Massachusetts in 1774 to natural history museums in the Midwest studying air pollution from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s. They are all brought together, though through a repeated set of images and interests — animals, inventions, places that have played an outsized role in the American imagination like circuses, sideshows, and Coney Island. But he does not romanticize these stories. He is clear-eyed about the racism that often animates these places, their American exceptionalism, the willingness of the public to be duped. The sympathy comes for people who are outsiders, debutantes leaving their comfortable lives behind to pursue knowledge or immigrant sandhogs who worked underwater to help construct the Brooklyn Bridge. (The sandhogs below are from the later construction of the Hudson & Manhattan Tunnels dug in 1908.)
DiMeo plays around with form in some of the stories, writing them in six scenes, a timeline, 50 words. They all share a conversational tone, with rhetorical questions, sentence fragments, and direct address to his readers. I was most interested in the stories where he did things that podcasts can’t, like showing the pictures he’s describing or speaking negatively about the Sacklers who sponsored the Temple of Dendur at the Met. Most of all, I loved the section at the end of the book where DiMeo told stories about his life and his family. I absolutely loved getting a sense of how he arrived at the format his stories take. If there’s one thing I share with DiMeo, it’s the intense desire to imagine oneself inside the past, one fragment at a time.

As a long time listener of The Memory Palace podcast, this book was such a treat. Each entry is a bite-sized delicacy of such delight and wonder. I often found myself savoring the words when I came to the end of each story, like a particularly delicious petit four.
These small stories of small moments in time are so powerful and satisfying. Some had me mulling over the fact that there is such a vast variety of life experiences. Each life real, each peek into another persons life a small treasure.
I absolutely loved it.