Summary of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Jim Williams, a billionaire, lived in a mansion in Savannah, Georgia. He was not trying to fool anyone by living the way he did. He was showing visitors through the house, and one man took him aside and told him that his money was old.
#2 Jim Williams was a successful dealer in antiques and a restorer of old houses. He had been president of the Telfair Academy, the local art museum, and his by-line had appeared in Antiques magazine.
#3 Williams began to buy bigger houses as his business grew. He bought the Italian Renaissance palazzo Armstrong House directly across Bull Street from the staid Oglethorpe Club. He also bought Mercer House, which had been empty for more than ten years.
#4 Williams’s Christmas party was the social event of the year in Savannah. It was known as the Party of the Year. He wrote names of guests on file cards and arranged them in two stacks: an In stack and an Out stack. He shunted the cards from one stack to the other, and made no secret of it.

Sujets

• 20th century
• United States

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669357377
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Jim Williams, a billionaire, lived in a mansion in Savannah, Georgia. He was not trying to fool anyone by living the way he did. He was showing visitors through the house, and one man took him aside and told him that his money was old.

#2

Jim Williams was a successful dealer in antiques and a restorer of old houses. He had been president of the Telfair Academy, the local art museum, and his by-line had appeared in Antiques magazine.

#3

Williams began to buy bigger houses as his business grew. He bought the Italian Renaissance palazzo Armstrong House directly across Bull Street from the staid Oglethorpe Club. He also bought Mercer House, which had been empty for more than ten years.

#4

Williams’s Christmas party was the social event of the year in Savannah. It was known as the Party of the Year. He wrote names of guests on file cards and arranged them in two stacks: an In stack and an Out stack. He shunted the cards from one stack to the other, and made no secret of it.

#5

Williams took me on a tour of his antiques shop, which was quartered in the carriage house. He showed me Queen Alexandra’s silverware, the Duchess of Richmond’s porcelain, and a silver service for sixty that had belonged to a Russian grand duke.

#6

The British sent whole shiploads of grapevines over from Madeira in the eighteenth century in hopes of turning Georgia into a wine-producing colony. Savannah’s on the same latitude as Madeira.

#7

The house was the birthplace of the famous songwriter Johnny Mercer, who wrote Moon River, I Wanna Be Around, and other standards. It was never lived in by the Mercer family, but film crews would always trample the yard.

#8

The author went to visit Williams, who had pulled a Nazi flag from a cabinet in his house. He had draped it over the balcony outside the window, and the filming crew stopped shooting. The furor it caused was something he hadn’t expected.

#9

The man who had the box was Jim Williams, a protester who had flown to France to buy it. He had it restored and then flew back to America with it. The next morning, he was down in his basement workshop restoring furniture, jet-lagged and unshaven.

#10

The author met Bonnie Tempelsman, who was dating Jimmy Carter, at the house. She was very down-to-earth and didn’t even bother brushing the dust off her chair when they sat down in the garden. She invited the author to visit her in New York next time he was there.

#11

The telephone will ring. It will be Danny. He will be charming and sweet-natured. He will say, Hey, Jim! This is Danny. I’m real sorry to wake you up. Boy, did I fuck up tonight! And I will say, Well, Danny, what happened this time. and he will say, I’m callin’ from the jailhouse.

#12

I met with Williams, who was the owner of an antique house restoration company. He had many loaded pistols hidden in different places around his house. He explained to me that he was a gambler, and that you have to be if you deal in antiques and restore houses.

#13

The author played Psycho Dice with Williams, and while he could not say for sure whether it worked, he did say that it was the best party in Savannah. He invited the author to the next one, which was for gentlemen only.

#14

I had lived in New York for 20 years, writing and editing for magazines. In the early 1980s, New York City had embarked on a nouvelle cuisine eating binge. Every week, two or three elegant new restaurants would open to great fanfare. I had never been to Savannah, but I had a vivid image of it anyway.

#15

I first encountered Savannah in Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind. It was set a century later, and the city had become an offstage presence in the book. It was a dignified, sedate, and refined city that looked down on Atlanta, which was a young frontier town.

#16

I had decided to drive down to Savannah, spend the night, and fly back to New York from there. I followed a zigzagging course that took me through the tidal flat-lands of South Carolina. As I approached Savannah, the road narrowed to a two-lane blacktop shaded by tall trees.

#17

The city of Savannah, Georgia, is made up of 20+ squares. They are the city’s jewels, and traffic is obliged to flow at a very leisurely pace around them.

#18

Savannah is a city that is famously hospitable. They love company, and they always have. They are not at all like the rest of Georgia, who are hostile and standoffish.

#19

Savannah is known for its history, and I was able to see many reminders of it while I was there. The city is surrounded by a live oak forest, and the mausoleum where I was to be buried if I died there was a memorial to the city’s great hosts and party givers.

#20

The author went to visit the gravestone of John Herndon Mercer, one of the founders of Savannah, which was littered with leaves and sand. The inscription read: AND THE ANGELS SING. For her, Johnny was the boy next door. He died on the same day as his parents, February 27, 1901.

#21

Aiken was raised by relatives after his parents died. He had a brilliant career, and when he retired, he came back to Savannah. He always knew he would. He died next door to the house where he had lived as a child, separated by a single brick wall.

#22

I spent a month in Savannah, and eventually came to consider myself a resident of the city. I would spend time in Savannah, and then return to New York.

#23

I moved to Savannah, and took up residence in a carriage house on East Charlton Lane. The apartment’s furnishings included an old navigator’s globe on a stand. I put my finger on Savannah and followed the thirty-second parallel around the world, which led me to my new home.

#24

The historic district of Savannah was built before the Civil War. City fathers abandoned the squares when the city expanded southward. South of the historic district lay a wide swath of Victorian gingerbread houses.

#25

The city of Savannah was the climax of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea, and it was burned to the ground by Sherman. It recovered quickly, but its financial underpinnings began to erode due to the growing labor force drawn away to the industrialized North.

#26

The story of blacks in Savannah was very different from that of whites. Slavery was banned in Georgia in 1735, but in 1749 the colony’s Trustees gave in to pressure from the settlers and legalized it.

#27

Mandy, the beautiful woman who lived in the house down the street, invited me to join her and her friends for a drink. She explained that she had been driving from Waycross to Savannah for six days a week to sing at the clubs in town.

#28

Joe Odom, the man who had turned off the electricity to his townhouse, was a tax lawyer, a real estate broker, and a piano player. He had three wives. He was calm for someone who had just pulled off a life-threatening, high-voltage act of larceny.

#29

The Odom house was a gathering place for the neighborhood. It had a piano in the kitchen, and it was from this room that the music and laughter spilled out over the garden walls up and down the street.

#30

Joe was a very friendly man who explained to me the rules of life in Savannah. He told me that people were wary of me because they thought I was writing an exposé about the city, but that they all hoped I would put them in my book.

#31

I began to arrange my apartment so that I could live and work in it comfortably. I visited a junk shop on the edge of town, and bought some furniture.