“Famous Nathan: A Family Saga of Coney Island, the American Dream, and the Search for the Perfect Hog Dog”
Flatiron Books, $26.99
Nathan Handwerker was a Jewish immigrant who was born in Austria-occupied Poland in 1892. On Easter Sunday 1912, he arrived at Ellis Island with $25. His brother Israel was there to greet him in the Great Hall, where immigrants were processed. He didn’t know a single word of English, but he was a fast learner, and he watched and waited and did what countless immigrants before him — and since — have done: He became his own boss, by selling the iconic hot dog that bears his name.
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Nathan’s grandson, Lloyd Handwerker (along with Gil Reavill), tells the story of Nathan’s Famous with great verve and strong storytelling skills (he is also a documentary filmmaker). During its heyday in the 1950s, the business grossed $3 million annually. Everyone ate there, including Jackie Kennedy. Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra liked the dogs so much that they had them “flown over when they were performing in London.” And yet, adds Handwerker, Nathan’s was never about celebrities. “It was democratic through and through.”
But it was not easy. Nathan managed to save $300, and with that tidy sum, he and a friend named Sam (“last name lost to history”) planned to go into business together. After Nathan noticed a little corner building on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue, he and Sam approached the proprietor who agreed to lease the space for $300 — $150 from each. It was July 1916. The business didn’t even have a name. “It was just two guys … selling frankfurters for a dime,” writes Handwerker. Business was slow at first until Nathan — now the sole owner –– thought of cutting the price of the dog in half to a nickel. It worked. The first weekend that he dropped the price, he more than quadrupled his sales.
Nowadays Nathan’s is also famous for its annual hot-dog-eating contest, a Fourth of July ritual where contestants try to gobble up the most dogs in 10 minutes. That’s part of the story, of course, but there’s much more to Nathan’s. It involves a man, a restaurant, a place and an era. Handwerker also writes about in-house fighting among family members and the ups and downs of Coney Island itself.
This is the classic American story about a particular family and a particular product — the humble hot dog — but it is also the story of America writ large, as seen through the eyes of the grandson of an immigrant.
“Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place”
University of Chicago Press, $27.50
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In 2010, Philip Marsden moved with his family to a small farmhouse in rural Cornwall, England. Surrounded by such natural beauty, he became interested in the landscape and the silent remnants of the past that he saw everywhere around him. He also made the decision to walk across Cornwall. His goal was Land’s End, the most westerly point of England. Marsden became fascinated by the idea of place. Place, he writes, is “distinctive, where people react to and live with the particular topography around them.”
And that’s what Marsden does in this evocative book: reacting to and writing about the places that he discovers and that mean something to him. These places include Bodmin Moor, stone circles, mining towns and sites associated with King Arthur, such as Tintagel and Glastonbury. He wonders what makes a place special? What sets it apart? He also writes about the people of Cornwall, such as the late St. Ives artist Peter Lanyon, whose paintings and fierce loyalty to the area captured the essence of this part of the world. And why, he asks, has Land’s End — his ultimate destination –– seeped so firmly into popular consciousness? After all, little has actually happened here, he offers: “no invasion, no nation-stirring oratory.”
A thoughtful and well-written meditation on place and myth, and finding meaning in the places that we call home.
June Sawyers is a freelance writer.
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