Podcast listeners may have come across The Memory Palace, the longrunning series comprising bite-size vignettes about forgotten moments in history, set against a gently tinkling soundtrack. Written and hosted by Nate DiMeo, it eschews the long-winded approach of many audio historians, instead zooming in on small details and stories, from a teenage human cannonball to a small-town alien hoax to the day Niagara Falls stopped falling.
Now, DiMeo has turned his podcast into a book, which has in turn spawned an audiobook version. This might seem a little superfluous given the project stems from a podcast, but the audiobook has a slightly different flavour, featuring a cast of narrators comprising podcasting and acting royalty. They include Latif Nasser, of Radiolab fame, bringing his customary sense of wonder to A History of Martian Civilisation 1877-1906, about the Italian astronomer who claimed to have discovered human-made canals on Mars; Deadpool’s Ryan Reynolds reading The Nickel Candy Bar, about a publicity stunt involving scores of chocolate bars attached to tiny parachutes being dropped on American towns and cities, causing havoc as they landed; and Dominic Hoffman delivering one of my favourites, The Glowing Orbs, about the 1960s astronaut John Glenn who thought he saw angels in space; in fact, the floating yellow seraphim were small droplets of urine that had been ejected from his space capsule.
