Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America's Romance with Illegal Drugs by Jill Jonnes

 Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America's Romance with Illegal Drugs is the earliest Jill Jonnes book I've read so far. It's a little less fluid than her later works--not badly written, just not quite as confident.  It is, like them, extensively researched and immersive-sometimes scarily so, given the subject.

There was a lot of new material here for me; Jonnes documents a pendulum swing in our national drug use; it goes up for a while when people discover new, "harmless" drugs and then back down as they discover the harm, before rising once more as a new drug is discovered or an old one rediscovered, past experience forgotten.

Worth reading both for its broad historical overview and for Jonnes' intensive work. The only real complaint I have is that, since it was published in 1999, the information is somewhat dated.  However, given the historical nature of the work and its depth, I still recommend it highly.

Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels by Jill Jonnes

My respect for Jill Jonnes is rising steadily. After reading Eiffel's Tower and enjoying it, I looked her up and realized she was also the person who wrote Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, which I remember enjoying. So, I grabbed Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels off the library shelves and settled down happily.

I wasn't disappointed. Conquering Gotham is an excellent book, an immersion into late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American life. Jonnes is an incredible researcher, drawing from unpublished letters as well as from newspaper accounts and books, and she manages to present the information fluidly, as lived reality, no mean feat.  There's an array of personalities here and also a sense of this as a real time where ordinary people and their daily lives were affected by one man's decision to build a railway tunnel. I highly recommend this and Jonnes' other work.

Oh, and the reason you're not getting a review of Empires of Light just now? I checked it out to reread but left it lying on the table where someone else saw it, read a few pages, and got pulled in. I hadn't the heart to pull it away, so I'll be rereading it later.

Eiffel's Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris's Beloved Monument and the Extraordinary World's Fair That Introduced It by Jill Jonnes

Eiffel's Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris's Beloved Monument and the Extraordinary World's Fair That Introduced It is a mouthful of a title. It's also a good book. The primary focus is, as the title suggests, the building of the Eiffel Tower. The rest of the 1889 World Fair is also covered, everything from painters' quarrels to the arrival and popularity of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show--which was wildly popular in France.

It's an interesting slice-of-life book, and I had a great time reading nineteenth-century flame wars (James Whistler loved a good quarrel), and noting that the Eiffel Tower was initially dismissed as something that "not even the Americans" would touch.