Book review: A taste will leave you wanting more

Nate DiMeo has pieced together a fine collection of historical exotica on air and between the covers of 'The Memory Palace'

The spectacular Temple of Dendur where patrons can take a breather and sit in spiritual repose in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, USA. Picture: Getty Images

• The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past 
• Nate DiMeo 
• Penguin Random House, £30.00

In the always competitive category of stuff tourists simply must do in New York, a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue must be in any top five. 

Sprawling for four city blocks, each wing contains artefacts from just about every era of civilisation, sculptures, objects, and paintings tracing the very arc of human existence. 

One of the first stops on the ground floor is the Egyptian antiquities section, room after room of relics culminating in the spectacular Temple of Dendur where patrons can take a breather and sit in spiritual repose.

Among the myriad tales spun in Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past are two wonderful yarns about how this Egyptian temple dating from the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus came to be rebuilt and re-housed on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. 

In the first, he relays its ancient origins and the fortuitous way the holy place was gifted by the Egyptians to the United States in the 1960s. 

The second explains how the money to rebuild and locate it in such vast splendor came from the Sacklers, the most infamous family in the country since they made billions turning a generation into opioid addicts.

As a podcaster and author, DiMeo’s brilliance is his ability to weave disparate threads, connective tissue binding together old and new, the sacred and profane, the beliefs that spawned the structure and the filthy money that has allowed museum visitors the space to savour this sliver of history.

He has written a book that is, as he describes it himself, “a cabinet of curiousities”. 

Each shelf offers something different, from madcap to macabre, maudlin to moving.

Take the plight of Minik Wallace, the Inuit boy transplanted to 19th century New York, where he presided over a tribal burial of his dead father only to discover later he’d been duped into praying over a bag of stones since the actual body had been donated to science. 

Revisit the summer of 1953 when the town of Springfield, Missouri, was suddenly and briefly over-run by Indian cobras. 

Dawdle a while with the “spirit” photography career of the scammer William Mumler. 

Run your finger along the antics of charming Stanley Clifford Weyman, a serial pretender who passed himself off as, among other guises, the consul general of Romania, a physician, and a college lecturer.

Those of us who teach history for a living treasure the podcast revolution and the productions that have shaken the dust of academia off the subject, making it readily accessible in a manner appreciated by younger students. 

Shows such as The Rest is History and Donal Fallon’s Three Castles Burning cherry-pick bizarre characters and improbable incidents from the margins and prize entertainment value over the esoteric.

DiMeo has pieced together a fine collection of historical exotica on air and between these covers.

Many times, the reader is left wanting more than a couple of pages. 

An amuse-bouche about a fascinating family like the Flying Wallendas Acrobatic Troupe is delicious yet can make you wish you were dining on their fate as a main course. 

Then again, it’s a measure of the way he lures you in and piques your interest that you spend half your time with this lavish production avidly Googling for more information on the people and events he so delightfully recounts. A very modern compliment.