20 Mar 2017

First Author Visit

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I made my first author visit this week: a presentation to the Wilson Elementary School Running Club.  Imagine my surprise to find there were more than fifty young runners in attendance.  Forest Hills sponsors its own 5K race in May which draws a lot of student entrants.  Joining the club serves as the best way to prepare for a successful race.

Mercer principal, Jodi Davidson, referred me to running club coordinator, Megan Staey, who referred me to Melissa Gerth, director of the Wilson club.  I had two days to put together a program.  Good thing I already had the outlines of one worked out in my mind.

The presentation went relatively well.  I took too much time on the history of the marathon, so had to rush into the main activity.  Introducing the race competitors, I struggled to keep their attention.  Handing out the voting pages, I worked a bit too hard to keep the noise from getting out of hand.  (There were a lot of them!) Then we tallied up the votes for the runner they thought would be the winner.  Ed Gardner was the biggest vote-getter, followed by Arthur Newton, and Giusto.  The three or four who voted for Andy Payne cheered enthusiastically when the final result was revealed.  That was satisfying.

Then they all went out to run!

20 Feb 2017

Kirkus Reviews: “An absorbing story of colorful times”

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Marathons are commonplace now, but one of the earliest 20th-century long-distance races was the multiday, coast-to-coast Transcontinental Foot Race, little known now but an event that captured the world’s imagination in 1928. The race began in Los Angeles and finished in New York City, covering 3,423.5 miles. Out of the 199 runners who began on March 4, 1928, only 55 finished 84 days later. Newspapers called it the Bunion Derby. The race was conceived by Oklahoma businessman Cyrus Avery at the height of the Roaring ’20s, a time of optimism and excess. Charles Lindbergh had recently made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight. People tried to outdo each other with outrageous stunts. Dance marathoners danced for days, and pole-sitters sat atop flagpoles for weeks to set and break records. Avery teamed up with C.C. Pyle, the “P.T. Barnum of Professional Sports,” to organize the race. The nearly 200 men of all races and nationalities who started the race faced a variety of obstacles—extreme weather, poor food and living conditions, prejudice, and injury. Speno’s detailed, engaging narrative brings the times and the race vividly to today‘s readers. Chapters are broken up into topical subsections (on the “Good Roads Movement” and international participation, for instance), and plentiful archival material complements the lively narrative. An absorbing story of colorful times. (photos, maps, statistics, bibliography, source notes) (Nonfiction. 10-16)

31 Jan 2017

Launch Event

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The Great American Foot Race will be released on Tuesday, April 4, 2017.  A signing event will take place at Blue Marble Books on Thursday, April 13, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.  The store is located at 1356 S. Ft. Thomas Ave, Ft. Thomas, Kentucky, 41075.  Please call ahead (859-781-0602) or email (bluemarble@fuse.net with spenoa in subject line) to notify the store of your attendance and to reserve a copy of the book.  Book reservations are not required but should be made by April 6 to guarantee availability.

See you there!

31 Dec 2016

Symphony for the City of the Dead

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I just finished reading M. T. Anderson‘s Symphony for the City of the Dead, a book that feels like it was written specifically for me.  I love the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and have wondered for many years how he survived in Stalinist Soviet Union.   Was he a stooge, writing music to please his Communist handlers?  Or was he a dissident, coding his music with subversive messages?  Through his narrative, Anderson makes clear that the great Soviet composer was a mixture of both defiance and compliance, both courage and cowardice.  In short: “He kept himself alive.”

Read the book for the story of a man of twitchy nervousness, a chain smoker with a mania for soccer and a tenderness for his children, the ability to write lyrical music with bombs thundering all around him.

Read the book for the tale of a city of canals and bridges, palaces and concert halls, as it undergoes revolution, purges, and the longest siege in recorded history.  All the horrors of the twentieth century are concentrated in a single city: St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad.

Read the book for the descriptions of the music.  They will impel you to your local library to find recordings of the pieces he mentions, above all Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, the Leningrad.