Celebrating Black History Month: Onesimus, African-born slave who saved Boston from smallpox 1721

Onesimus, an African-born slave born in the late 1600s, was enslaved and, in 1706, given to Cotton Mather, a New England Puritan minister, who was instrumental in the Salem Witch trials and prosecuting pirates.  His real name is not known and Mather was the one who named him Onesimus, after a 1st century slave mentioned in the Bible.  The name means "useful, helpful, or profitable".

Around 1716, Onesimus told Mather of an inoculation performed on him and others in Africa that protected him from smallpox, where a thorn is inserted into a pus-filled spore of an infected person and injected into the skin of a healthy person, making them immune to the disease.

When smallpox broke out in Boston in 1721, Mather promoted the inoculation method as protection, citing Onesimus as the source.  Of course, Bostonians were having none of the African medicine, butr a physician Zabdiel Boylston performed the method on his 6-year-old son and two slaves.  Two hundred eighty people were inoculated in 1721-1722.  Only 6 of them died, a rate of 2.2%, compared to 14.3% of people who were not inoculated.

In 2016, Onesimus was declared one of the "Best Bostonians of All Time".

"Legacy of Hephaestus" by Alex Morgan re-released on Amazon!

My fourth Corey Shaw novel Legacy of Hephaestus is now live on Amazon!

Click here to go to Amazon!

Blurb:

Corey Shaw is trying to salvage what's left of his Baltic cruise vacation by sleeping his way across the Netherlands and Norway.  About the time he arrives in Amsterdam, the largest yellow diamond ever discovered, the Lava Diamond, is stolen from a diamond factory.

Corey is glad to leave the case in the hands of Dutch authorities, but when he gets to Oslo, a paramour is murdered.  For once in his lifetime, he is glad to see the end of a vacation. But things get worse when he returns to Boston.  The diamond shows up in an unlikely place and a volcanology professor on sabbatical in Norway has disappeared.

Thinking the stolen diamond case closed, Corey heads back across the Atlantic to help Norwegian police to search for the professor.  Soon he uncovers more than a missing persons’ case.  It is a plot to turn the diamond world on its head. 

"Murder At The Green Lantern" by Alex Morgan re-released on Amazon!

My second Corey Shaw novel Murder at the Green Lantern is now available on Amazon!

Here is the link:

Blurb:

After a fetish party at a gay bar in Washington, DC, a young man is murdered and left nailed to a St. Andrew’s Cross.  Paranormal gay sleuth Corey Shaw thinks someone has passed a divine judgment on him, and may be a signal to other gays in the city.  The mystery leads him on a trail from Boston to the halls of the U.S. Capitol Building in DC.   

Happy birthday, Space Shuttle astronaut Albert Sacco!

Albert Sacco, Jr., born May 3, 1949 in Boston, Massachusetts, went into space aboard Columbia (STS-73) as a payload specialist in October-November 1995.  He spent 16 days in space.

As of January 2011, he is a dean of the college of engineering at Texas Tech University.

Celebrating Black History Month - Stephanie Wilson, African-American astronaut

Stephanie Wilson is the second black female astronaut to travel into space, after Mae Jemison, and she is a veteran of three space shuttle flights.  She has spent more time in space than any other black astronaut, male or female. 

Born September 27, 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, she began her astronaut training in August 1996 and first went into space on Discovery (STS-121) as mission specialist in July 2006.  She and fellow astronaut Lisa Nowak operated the robotic arm on the International Space Station during the mission.

Her second flight was on Discovery (STS-120) October-November 2007.  She operated the robotic arm again.

Her third and latest (hopefully not the last) mission was on back on Discovery (STS-131) in April 2010 as mission specialist.  She participated in interviews while on board as well as operating the robotic arm.

Happy birthday, Madeline Kahn!

This uber-talented actress came into this world September 29, 1942 in Boston.  She trained in opera while attending Hoffstra University on Long Island and she starred in several productions during her studies. 

She appeared in her first feature film "What's Up, Doc?" (one of my favorite slap-stick movies ever) with Barbara Streisand.  Her performance as Lili Von Shtupp in "Blazing Saddles" has been ranked by Premiere Magazine as #74 of the top 100 performances of all time.

One of my favorite scenes starring this wonderful actress, who left us way too soon, is the farewell scene at the train station in "Young Frankenstein".

Review of Home in Time for Christmas by Heather Graham

I enjoyed Heather Graham’s Flynn brothers trilogy because although her stories are het romance/erotica, she includes a wonderful paranormal aspect to her novels. In the Flynn brothers stories, that aspect bordered on supernatural and in one case, Deadly Harvest, almost stepped across the line.


In Home in Time for Christmas, the paranormal element is time travel. During the Revolutionary War, Jake Mallory is about to hanged by the British for his anti-British publications. His adopted sister Serena casts a strange spell with rose petals (in December!) and he suddenly finds himself in the twenty-first century.

Melody Tarleton, on her way home for the holidays nearly runs over him as he appears before her eyes and her car. Convinced he is a re-enactment actor/nut case suffering from amnesia, she takes him home to her family since she has no idea what else to do with him.

Her father, mother and brother accept Jake into their home with little questions to Melody’s explanation. Mark Hathaway, the man Melody is supposed to be getting engaged to isn’t swayed and becomes suspicious of the enigmatic gentleman, who bears more than a passing resemblance to him.

As hard as she tries to keep his secret although not believing it herself, Melody is surprised to find out that her parents have pieced together how she really came to meet Jake and they have no issue with him being from the past. In fact, they have an idea how to return him to his own time. And the revelation gives her little comfort.

Despite her misgivings, she is convinced that her mother and father know what they are doing and helps them to the novel’s final and somewhat predictable conclusion.

In the Flynn brothers trilogy, Graham put more emphasis on the paranormal aspects, but in Home in Time for Christmas, much of the story is spent on Melody trying to explain to everyone and herself Jake’s sudden appearance and their budding romance.

I prefer the stronger paranormal angle to the romance but I’m probably outnumbered in that respect. In the trilogy, the paranormal phenomenon that formed the premise for those stories was a bit more complex, more detailed than a doorway opened in time with rose petals. We’ve also seen this scenario before: a person about to be hanged is spirited away to another time in both “Dark Shadows” and “The Twilight Zone”.

But if you prefer romance to paranormal, Home in Time for Christmas isn’t too spooky to be romantic.

Prime Time by Hank Phillipi Ryan

I first met Hank Phillipi Ryan last year at Bouchercon in Baltimore when she was handing out bookmarks for the Jungle Red Writers, a group of women authors. I recognized the nail polish from the movie “The Women” right away. And only a woman would mention hot flashes in the very first sentence of her book. Thus begins Prime Time, a witty and entertaining read.

Ryan’s sleuth Charlotte ‘Charlie’ McNally is an investigative reporter for a television station in Boston. When suspected whistleblower Bradley Foreman dies in a one-car crash with no witnesses, Charlie has no reason to believe it’s anything beyond a tragic accident. That is until she discovers an email, disguised as spam, sent to her and two others from Foreman prior to his death. The grieving widow gives her a stack of files that her husband brought home from work before his untimely demise. In them, Charlie finds a number of similar emails with references to Shakespeare’s works and Bible verses. She also finds her heart, which had long been buried behind work schedules, overtime and the looming November sweeps week, and promptly loses it to Josh Gelston, handsome college professor and co-addressee on Foreman’s pre-crash email.

Shortly after, the third person the email was sent to dies in another one-car accident with no witnesses. Now Charlie suspects there is more to that email than just spam. When she attends the funeral of the second crash victim, she is threatened by an old woman to stop her investigation. As if. She also sees Josh there, unexpectedly. All of a sudden, she’s not so sure about him and his intentions anymore.

It’s apparent why Prime Time is an Agatha winner. Ryan’s writing style is clever, humorous and in some places, downright snarky. Charlotte McNally is a real character that the reader can relate to and sympathize with. She has the human failings we all have but won’t admit, like the scene where she’s checking out the good-looking detective while her producer and friend lies in a hospital bed beaten to a pulp.

Ryan also manages to keep the action brisk and face-paced without leaving the reader out of breath or confused. Very well-written, Prime Time is a great and fun read that’s sure to appeal to everyone.