Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman

April 28, 2012 · 11:46 am

Peace, Love and Understanding

Saw Nick Lowe perform at the Tarrytown Music Hall last night, like a young rocker at age 63 with his shock of white hair. Amazing to see the longevity of an artist who loves what they’re doing as he so clearly does. The audience was wild for him. In between songs from his newest album — isn’t it funny how the music industry persists in calling cd’s or even virtual works the antiquated “album” — and chestnuts like “I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll” he praised the Music Hall, a venerable being in and of itself, a little creaky now but filled with character. Those strange silhouettes that decorate panels around the sides, depicting what look like southern belles and their swains. When he did “What’s So Funny ‘Bout…” which of course he’s put out there a thousand times, he did it down tempo in almost a husky whisper, wonderfully. I was thinking the whole time about the turns a person’s career can take, the downs and ups, with a guy like Nick Lowe enjoying more acclaim now than ever before and writing songs that are among his best. How great that must feel.

Nick Lowe

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April 26, 2012 · 4:05 pm

Fantastic News

DCL Agency

FOR IMMEDIATE  RELEASE:

Contact: Betsy Lerner 212-645-7606

Betsy@dclagency.com

VIKING’S SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER THE ORPHANMASTER IS OPTIONED.

Nationally recognized independent bookseller Mitchell Kaplan and award winning Hollywood producer Paula Mazur (The Mazur/Kaplan Company) are adding Viking’s major summer release, the debut thriller THE ORPHANMASTER by Jean Zimmerman, to their feature slate of bestselling titles including The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society  and Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.

Represented by Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency in association with Creative Artists Agency, Zimmerman’s historical thriller, set in 1663 in the hardscrabble Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (present day lower Manhattan), pairs a beguiling Dutch she-merchant with a dashing British spy who together hunt down a demonic serial killer preying on the colony’s orphans.

The Orphanmaster will be published on June 19, 2012  by Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

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Filed under Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster

April 25, 2012 · 7:29 pm

If The Orphanmaster Were a Movie…

Who would play Blandine Couvering and who would act the part of Edward Drummond?

Perhaps they’d resemble this couple, in spirit anyway.

New Amsterdam Traders

This is one of the earliest images we have of New Amsterdam, in the background — note Fort Amsterdam and the city gallows — and two of its residents, a woman and a man engaged in trade. Note also the slaves toting goods. The male trader holds a tobacco leaf, while the women, the she-merchant, offers a basket of produce or other goodies, and they appear to be bargaining over the carcass of a beaver lying between them on the ground. Both wear high-style beaver hats — the product that more than any other brought colonists to the New World in quest of beaver fur.

Blandine may not possess such a craggy face but her costume would likely resemble that in the picture, and Drummond at one point in The Orphanmaster exhibits a dashing cobalt cloak much like this one. I’m thinking hard about actors and actresses that could personify folks like those in this picture, like those in the novel, because of some great news I got that I will post about tomorrow!

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April 24, 2012 · 6:10 pm

The Specter of Hannibal Lecter

A great early review of The Orphanmaster from the blog itsallaboutthebook.wordpress.com. I like her description of it: “a 17th century Silence of the Lambs.”

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April 24, 2012 · 5:39 pm

My Cinematic Cabin

A film crew is amazing. I had a group of extremely visually focused people at my house this morning to shoot a short informational spot about me for people interested in The Orphanmaster.

First, they spotted a raccoon. Something I haven’t done in at least a year. As I said, their visual acuity is something. A hawk obligingly soared overhead and a bumblebee landed on a pink tulip for the occasion. The crew spooked two deer. The stink bugs stayed away at our request.

The director, cameraman and assistant went all around the outside of the cabin and into the woods shooting the “B Roll.” Chocolate syrup, emulating blood, was used to drawn a witika sign on an elm tree.

Next, they turned my living room upside down, putting all the furniture in the opposite place than it had been in before. Two years worth of dust came to light. I sat in a hard chair and we began.

They filmed not only me trying to be articulate about life in the seventeenth century but also my handwritten notes, various voluminous research tomes, the edges of maps, and whatever else they thought would make for a cool two-minute epic. Afterward they headed off to the Indian caves in Inwood Park, the inspiration for Orphanmaster‘s Place of Stones. Then they would wind up in lower Manhattan with the idea of capturing a kind of then and now snapshot of places like Wall Street (used to have a real wall) and Broadway (the oldest street in the city, a former Indian trail).

Luckily there were doughnuts for fuel. Or as the Dutch call them, Olie-koeken. Gil fried up about two dozen and most were gone by the end of the session.

Now that I have had my close-up, I am ready for my nap.

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing

April 23, 2012 · 5:08 pm

Fine Books& Collections Review

An extremely nice review today of Love, Fiercely in Fine Books & Collections, by Rebecca Rego Barry, who told my publicist, “What a fabulous book. (Wish I had written it!)”  Below is the review, and here’s the link:

A Romance for Collectors

BY REBECCA REGO BARRY ON APRIL 23, 2012 8:48 AM
Love, Fiercely is a fantastic new book by Jean Zimmerman. Its subtitle, A Gilded Age Romance, is exactly the kind of thing that stops me from browsing any further at the bookshop. Zimmerman chronicles the true story of a beautiful heiress and a wealthy young architect in turn-of-the-century New York. Yes, theirs was a life filled with mansions, balls, and summer cottages, but these two were a bit different, too: Edith (whose face was used as the basis for a colossal Daniel Chester French sculpture) lobbied for women’s suffrage and kindergarten programs in the U.S., while Newton strove for social reform and worked on tenement renovation. On their two-year honeymoon in Paris, they were painted by John Singer Sargent. The painting, Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes, 1897, is pictured on the book’s cover. Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is considered one of the artist’s bests and–with a flushed Edith in ‘everyday’ clothes–a ringing in of the modern world.For collectors, there is an incredible sub-narrative to savor in this book — around the mid-point of his life, I.N. Phelps Stokes became a manic collector of prints and maps of New York City. Trying to preserve the bucolic past of his youth, he bought everything he could get his hands on and spent his entire fortune doing so. Zimmerman writes of Stokes’ goal: “Collect every map, every view, every fact, every detail about Old New York. Research the city’s beginnings. Bind it all together in a book of exquisite quality.”

Which is what he did. Titled The Iconography of Manhattan Island, the massive, six-volume set was his life’s passion. In it are reproductions of everything Stokes could get his hands on, plus histories, chronologies; it took a team of researchers and more than a dozen years to complete. The edition was 402 copies, and those, Zimmerman tells us, are scarce (and expensive) today. (Christie’s sold an inscribed one last year for $5,625, a steal! They tend to go for double that retail, and even the reprint editions aren’t cheap.) She adds, “None of the classic or contemporary histories of New York could have been written without the Iconography as a source.”

Love, Fiercely is an engaging and erudite biography of this incredible couple and their passions. I heartily recommend it.

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April 22, 2012 · 3:13 pm

Rain Which Droppeth

Rain after drought.

Oliver won’t set foot in a drizzle unless you boot him out the door. He’s too delicate for that.

Pit-hound Under Magnolia

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Filed under Dogs, Jean Zimmerman

April 21, 2012 · 7:07 pm

Victor of Aveyron

Back on line.

Did some research about feral children today. The question among those who philosophize about such creatures can be boiled down to this: Does a wild child possess a soul?

Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, captured in 1800 and made famous by a book written by his tutor, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, captivated Europe. He could run like the wind but was more likely to sit and rock silently — he only learned to pronounce two spoken words, “eau” and “oh Dieu”. But he responded like crazy to the weather outside the window, laughing at sunshine or gnashing his teeth, communing with the moon, racing outside to roll around in the snow. He could grow melancholy looking into a pool of water. One intellectual marveled at “the intensity of the boy’s sad pleasure in the natural world.”

I like that: sad pleasure.

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Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman

April 20, 2012 · 8:31 pm

Down for the Count

A computer crash and I am relying on the kindness of family members to post this. So… while they pour my old hard drive into a new machine, I’ll be sort of out of sorts. See you in a few days.

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April 19, 2012 · 1:19 pm

Spring


The Winter being over,
In order comes the Spring,
Which doth green herbs discover,
And cause the birds to sing.
The night also expired,
Then comes the morning bright,
Which is so much desired,
By all that love the light.
This may learn
Them that mourn,
To put their grief to flight:
The Spring succeedeth Winter,
And day must follow night.
 
(An Collins, 1640s – 1650s)

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Poetry

April 18, 2012 · 2:59 pm

Booklist Review

The Orphanmaster is getting a starred review in Booklist, published by the American Library Association. Among the praiseworthy epithets: “compulsively readable”!

“In 1663, New Amsterdam colonists are plagued by a malevolent, cannibalistic spirit known as the witika (a version of the Algonquin wendigo); by difficult relations with the local Lenape tribes; and by the despotic cruelty of Director General “Peg Leg” Stuyvesant. Suspicions run rife as orphan children disappear, and when the orphanmaster, Aet Visser, comes under suspicion, his trader friend, Blandine van Couvering, reluctantly joins the handsome English spy, Edward Drummond, in finding the truth. Their mutual attraction is hardly surprising, but the grisly clues they uncover, and the depravity they expose, will shock even veteran readers of historical thrillers. A fascinating perspective on colonial politics and human behavior, this compulsively readable, heartbreaking and grisly mystery set in a wild, colonial America will appeal to fans of Robert McCammon’s fast-paced and tautly suspenseful Mister Slaughter (2010) and Eliot Pattison’s Bone Rattler (2007).”

— Jen Baker

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April 17, 2012 · 2:29 pm

A Glasse Half Full

All she did was write the most popular British cookbook of the 18th century, and it led her into poverty, debtor’s prison, bankruptcy, and the selling off of her most valuable possession, the copyright for The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, first published in 1747, with 20 editions to come. She rebounded with books on household management and The Compleat Confectionar. But no one would know Hannah Glasse’s true name until 1938, after a historian’s careful sleuthing, nearly 200 years after Glasse first created her receipts, as they were known then. Her simple pseudonym: A Lady.

What will you discover if you delve into Glasse’s masterwork now? You can, because facsimile’s have been printed by various publishers. You will find, in addition to wonderful recipes:

A certain cure for the bite of a mad dog.

LET the patient be blooded at the arm nine or ten ounces. Take the of the herb, called in Latin, lichen cinereus tareſtis ; in English, aſh coloued ground liver-wort, cleaned, dried, and powdered, half an ounce. Of black pepper powdered, two drams. Mix theſe well together, and divide the powder into four doſes, one of which muſt be taken every morning faſting, and four mornings ſuxxeſſively, in half a pint of cow’s milk warm. After theſe four doſes are taken, the patient muſt go into the cold bath, or a cold ſpring or river every morning faſting for a month. He muſt be dipt all over, but not to ſtay in (with his head above water) longer than half a minutee, if the water be very cold. After this he muſt go in three times a week for a fortnight longer.

The Art of Cookery

Read more of Glasse’s work at Celtnet: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/glasse-medicines-repellents-22.php#dogs

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Filed under Cooking, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman

April 16, 2012 · 7:13 pm

Pansies

Planted the windowboxes today. Pansies. I don’t know how long it will take them to wither in this heat. It’s impossible to say whether we should luxuriate in the sun or run from the weather in terror.

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Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

April 15, 2012 · 10:48 am

Orphanmaster On the Road

Later this Spring I plan to go around to various places and talk about The Orphanmaster, not only about the writing of it but accompanied by a slide show that will give some insight, I hope, into the way life was lived in 1663.

I’ve posted a preliminary schedule of appearances under the Events tab in the Orphanmaster section of this site. More to come, if you want to check back.

If you can think of someplace I should go that’s not listed, please leave a comment here or contact Louise Braverman at Viking, Louise.Braverman@us.penguingroup.com.

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April 14, 2012 · 1:58 pm

The Hawk Is Out

The hawks that soar over the cabin must experience flight as a long swooping amusement park ride. We see them perched in the trees around the house, too. It seems as though the number of hawks locally is increasing, but maybe I’m just noticing them more.
A pair of red-tailed hawks — the most common type in New York State — have taken up residence on a ledge outside the 12nd floor office of the president of NYU, of all places,  overlooking Washington Square Arch. Two babies, called eyases, hatched this week, in a nest of sticks, plastic and pizza plates. White fuzzballs with jet black eyes and beaks. You can watch the development of the infants — obsessively, if you are like many New Yorkers — by checking in with the Hawk Cam set up by the New York Times. And it’s up close and personal, all the rat and pigeon tidbits the mother, Rosie, feeds the babies, usually dropped off at the nest by Bobbie, the father, and all the spewed baby hawk poop that often lands upon the lens of the camera.

The Hawk Nursery

You get fantastically close to these amazing creatures. I became totally engrossed a season ago when an eyas named Pip  grew up and fledged. So check it out.

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