Tired of seeing the same titles on every “Best Of” list? In this third annual special episode, host Blaine DeSantis cuts through the noise to deliver his personal baker’s dozen of the absolute best books he’s read all year. If you’re searching for the perfect present for the readers in your life, this list of Christmas book recommendations 2025 has something for everyone, from your spouse and parents to siblings and friends. Forget the popularity contests; these are 13 compulsively readable books, read cover-to-cover, that are guaranteed to surprise and delight.
This is the ultimate Books and Looks podcast wish list, curated to solve the overwhelming problem of choosing from over a million books published each year. Blaine dives deep into his top picks across a wide range of genres, ensuring you’ll find the perfect match for any taste. We start with some of the best nonfiction books 2025 has to offer, exploring pressing geopolitical issues in America in the Arctic by Mary Thompson-Jones and getting a stunning insider’s view of modern Russia with Jill Doherty’s My Russia. The episode then moves into a collection of unique memoir recommendations that celebrate the human spirit, from Marie Leautey’s incredible story of running a marathon every single day in Leautey’s World Run to John Seabrook’s fascinating and complex family history in The Spinach King, the story of the family that made frozen lima beans a household staple. We also follow Graham Broyd’s journey in Backpack, Jacket, Surfboard, as he retraces his 1980 hitchhiking trip across America.
The list continues with incredible historical fiction and mystery books, including Sarah Dunant’s masterful novel The Marquesa, which brings to life the first woman of the Italian Renaissance, Isabella d’Este. Blaine also highlights captivating biographies, such as Sister Aimee, Claire Hoffman’s look at the spectacular rise and fall of Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, and Jan Gradvall’s The Story of ABBA, offering an exclusive look into the lives of the iconic supergroup. We explore captivating nonfiction, from the surprisingly fascinating story of a despised bird in Starlings by Mike Stark to disappearing global traditions in Eliot Stein’s Custodians of Wonder. David Krell’s Do You Believe in Magic? provides a vibrant snapshot of America during the disco era of 1978. Finally, for those who love a good page-turner, Blaine recommends two compulsively readable mysteries: Danger, No Problem by Cindy F. Fariña, a thriller featuring a Filipino-American bounty hunter, and Ivory Bones by Sara Winokur, which centers on the mysterious and valuable Lewis Chessmen. These Christmas book recommendations 2025 are the best of the best from a year of reading.
Introduction
Blaine DeSantis: Welcome to Books and Looks, where we do a deep dive with authors so you can discover your next great book. This is a very special day and a special edition of Books and Looks, because this is our third annual Christmas wish list. We have had massive, and I do mean massive numbers of new subscribers, new followers, thousands of more people on podcasts, really.
Introducing the Third Annual Christmas Book Wish List
Blaine DeSantis: Subscribers are up 30-40 percent; the numbers are just going out of the roof. So I have to explain a little bit about the Christmas wish list. First of all, it’s that time of year everybody you see is going to start putting out a best list. Amazon does it. You see it with Goodreads; they have a popularity contest—vote for this, vote for that for the best of this category. You’ll see the big newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, like the New York Times, telling you what are the best books, maybe the best book.
Blaine DeSantis: Over a million books are published each year. I’m not vain enough to tell you I’ve read a million books. Not at all. They aren’t either. And what happens is they get a lot of different people who read books. They tell them, hey, this is the one I think is very good, and they publish it. Here, I read all the books, cover to cover. I’ve read them all. Over this past year, I’ve gotten over 5,000 books for my pleasure of reading. I have received 1,200 of those from the publishers. Out of those 1,200, I have to whittle those down to what shows up in the podcast. So I can’t tell you that these are the best of the best, but they’re the best books that I’ve liked the whole year round.
Blaine DeSantis: And now we’re at the third annual Christmas wish list. Do you have readers in your family? They may have a list. What books would I like or what books should I get? This is what you want to give them. Just listen to the wishlist. These are great, great books for you, your spouse, grandma, grandpa, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, children, nieces, nephews, name them. These are books that you know your family better than I do, obviously, and you know who likes what. These books are going to fit a lot of categories. And I think these are books that I feel would be on my wish list if I was wishing for them this Christmas. So let’s begin with the newest genre, which I’ve never really done before.
Geopolitical Reads: Understanding the Arctic and Modern Russia
Blaine DeSantis: It’s geopolitics. I know a lot of people go, “Oh, that’s so stuffy.” It can be stuffy. Also, very educational. And this year, we’ve got a couple of books under geopolitics which are just and simply outstanding. I want to begin with Mary Thompson-Jones’s book, America in the Arctic. I have a cheat sheet here. I got to tell you, I can’t remember everything off the top of my head. But I asked you to go to video number 107. YouTube 107. That’s America in the Arctic by Mary Thompson-Jones. This is a wonderful book about the Arctic and how it’s been changing and how our relationship with the fellow Arctic members has been changing over the years.
Blaine DeSantis: We’ve talked about Greenland this year, and there’s Iceland, there’s Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, U.S., and Russia. And that’s it. Don’t let them fool you. If it’s not those places, it’s not in the Arctic. I think Denmark may be in the Arctic via the Greenland thing. I’m not sure. But don’t let them tell you that China is in the Arctic. It’s not. It’s sub-Arctic. But they want a piece of the Arctic, as does India, Pakistan, the Philippines. Why?
Blaine DeSantis: Trade. Everybody wants to trade across the top because of the Northwest Passage. And the land is getting more and more melting of ice. And so there’s more of a chance to go through. And some countries, oh yes, some countries we don’t want to mention whom but they start with the letter R, and they want it for military. That’s right. They want to have their military up there. This book is not a military book. This is a great book about how we interact with all the different countries up there and what some of the problems are up there as climate changes. I didn’t say climate change; I said climate changes through maybe global warming or whatever things happen.
Blaine DeSantis: For instance, did you know that reindeer, this is in this book, reindeer is a major cause of an anthrax infestation. That’s right. Because the permafrost is starting to melt and the reindeer start pawing up that permafrost. And it releases anthrax, which makes people sick. We’ve got to find a way to take care of that. We haven’t built a new icebreaker in America for 50 years. Why is that? And part of the reason is we don’t have any welders, shipbuilders, ship designers, anything. We don’t have enough for this.
Blaine DeSantis: Mary Thompson-Jones goes through all the different countries and explores our relationship with all of them. Everybody hooted and hollered when Donald Trump says he wants to buy Greenland. He’s not the first. There have been three or four presidents going back to the Lincoln presidency that have wanted to buy Greenland. Woodrow Wilson wanted to buy Greenland. It’s very strategic. And when you realize how little they have up there in terms of defense, you understand why we get concerned when we see those Russian submarines starting to come over. Sweden, by the way, we are learning about them, how they went from basically being a country that didn’t want anything to do with defense. And now they buy most all their defense supplies from us here in the United States. These are facts and things that Mary has given us. She teaches at the Naval War College. She’s an expert in the field. And this is a book I think anybody who’s interested in geopolitics would love.
Blaine DeSantis: Which brings me to my next book, My Russia by Jill Doherty. That’s podcast 122. Jill Doherty, many of you may remember the name. I know a lot of people when they saw this video remembered her; she was the Moscow bureau chief. Almost 20 years she was over there reporting. She grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. And while there, as a child, she started learning Russian. It was taught in schools in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I grew up two hours away. We didn’t learn Russian—Spanish and French and German. That’s it. But they taught Russian up there.
Blaine DeSantis: And so she learned this and fell in love with it. She ended up studying over in, I think it was Petersburg. And so she was very fluent. Eventually got a job with the U.S. Information Agency over there. And now she talks about her time in Russia, including the fact that in 2022, I think, just before the Ukraine invasion, she got a frantic call. You got to go to Russia. They’re going to invade the Ukraine. She gets over there. The Russians start laughing at her. What are you here for? We’re not invading the Ukraine. What are you talking about? What’s this buildup on the border? Nothing. Don’t worry about it at all.
Blaine DeSantis: All of a sudden, middle of the night, she gets a call from a Russian compatriot, a journalist who says, you better get out of Dodge because guess what? They’re going in. And so she leaves. And you can’t trust these people over there. They’re telling A and doing B. She tells about her relationship with Vladimir Putin, how she met him before he was anything, really, because she’s been there through many, many leaders and prime ministers, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, now Putin.
Blaine DeSantis: And Putin was picked to be the successor, and he has grown. Boy, has he grown in that role, I’ll tell you what. But she even relates a story where Vladimir Putin kisses her. That’s right. Out of the blue at a reception, he comes over and gives her a kiss. That shook the heck out of her. And why do they do it? And so she relates a lot of stuff about this, things you might not remember. You might remember the Chechen wars and they were blowing up things and blowing up schools and theaters and stuff like that. Some of the hardest things she’s had to report upon.
Blaine DeSantis: But she’s candid. She tells you all about her life. She tells you about life over there in Russia, how things are, how things have changed, how instead of being a cooperative country, as they all thought they were going to become, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism, things have changed. And all of a sudden, now they’re adversarial. You can almost tie that into what’s going on with America and the Arctic. Because Putin has done a lot of putting money into the military, as we all know. But their population shrinks. And so what are you doing for your country? Are you just building up a monster defense industry and nothing else? That’s a problem. But anyway, she’s there and she relates all her information, all her stories about it. It is a wonderful, wonderful book. And I would encourage all of you who like memoirs or want to know about geopolitics, this is another book for you.
Unique Memoirs: Running the World, Uncovering Family History, and a Journey Across America
Blaine DeSantis: Next, I go to memoirs. Now, memoirs are interesting because not every memoir touches a person. But some touched me, really did, because I know it’s that person’s experiences, but I can empathize with them. Maybe I relate with them. And the first one I want to talk to you about is from episode number 130. It was called Leautey’s World Run by Marie Leautey. Leautey’s World Run is about the woman who ran around the world. That’s right. She ran around the world faster than any other woman. Can you imagine that? She ran around the world.
Blaine DeSantis: She would have done it continually had she not kept getting interrupted by COVID problems. But Marie started out at age 29. Realized she wanted to run a little bit, was terribly out of shape. By the time she’s in her 40s, she decides she’s going to try to run around the world. And there is an organization that tracks this. She will become the seventh person to run around the world.
Blaine DeSantis: I don’t know about you, but I know a few people who trained for a marathon. A marathon. That’s a heck of a thing to do. Heck of an accomplishment. One marathon. Every day that Marie Leautey ran, she ran at least a marathon in distance or longer. Every day, a marathon. Over 700 days, a marathon. Can you imagine this? She had to run through four different continents. She ran through Europe, basically twice almost because of the pandemic. She ran through North America. She ran through South America, including going up the Andes Mountains, which is brutal. And she ran through Australia and New Zealand.
Blaine DeSantis: Also, she did this while pushing a baby carriage. That’s right, because she sold all her items and took with her what she needed. How is she going to do it? She put it in a baby stroller. Can you imagine this? And she ran this whole time pushing a baby cart. With around 30 pounds or 30 kilos of her clothing, a computer so she could log in where she is each night. And she ran this entire time. The only injury she had was her hands holding on to the baby carriage. That’s it. Nothing else. She had no problems, no injuries. She knew how to self-diagnose any issues. She listened to her body. She never got really sick.
Blaine DeSantis: She even ran through a river in Italy because the bridge was out and it was pouring rain and she had to get to the other side. And so she ran across, took her shoes and socks off, and ran across with whatever she took, first of all, put it over there, runs back across again, goes back a next time, goes back a third time. Aye, aye, aye. And these are marvelous stories about her life, about who she meets, really wonderful people she met on this. She never really was ever threatened at any time. She ran through all these different countries, all these different continents.
Blaine DeSantis: And her memoir about this and changing her life and basically saying, you can do it too. Maybe not running, but put one step in front of the other. Diet today will help you diet tomorrow, which will help you diet the next day. Or do something else. Maybe there’s something you wish to change in your life. You can do it if you do it one day at a time. And Marie made a remarkable transformation. Just a wonderful story. Stories about being stopped at the border in Australia and having to pay a massive fine because of a dead onion. A dead spring onion. That’s a heck of a story. So lots of stuff that you could like in there. You have a friend who’s a runner. You have somebody who is into memoirs. This is a great book for them. Leautey’s World Run. Oh boy.
Blaine DeSantis: The next one is The Spinach King by John Seabrook. That’s number 128. The Spinach King is the story of the Seabrook family. Seabrook Farms was one of the major industrial agricultural places out there. They became huge. They were right there with Bird’s Eye and all the other guys. They were big. They were in New Jersey. And this is John’s basically family history. And it’s a fascinating history because a lot of this stuff has been buried or not known until recently.
Blaine DeSantis: For instance, John’s great-grandfather came over from England and eventually started a little tract of land and then it grew and grew and grew. And then John’s grandfather basically bought him out and cut him out of the family history. Why? Because John’s grandfather wanted to be an aristocrat, wanted to be a plutocrat. And he found out there was another Seabrook branch down in South Carolina here where I’m at that was very, very tut, tut, tut, tut and everything else. Plantation owners, boom, ba, boom, ba, boom. So he doesn’t talk about great-grandfather anymore. Matter of fact, we’re not even sure where his great-grandfather’s buried anymore. It’s an amazing story. The grandfather built this thing up, built this thing up, no doubt.
Blaine DeSantis: And then the son, that’s right. John’s son bought out his dad and basically put him out to pasture. But we had things like race riots there in New Jersey, a race riot. I never knew that the Klan was big and that things were happening. But what happened was this farm got so big that during World War II, they went out to the internment camps out west and they got a deal with the government to have them ship the people in the internment camps to the east to work on the farms that Seabrook owns. And it wasn’t much better than being in an internment camp. It was hard work, low-paying work. Weren’t treated all that well. You were all segregated by race, color, creed, whatever. But the people were out, at least they were not behind bars or behind that barbed wire.
Blaine DeSantis: So that’s how this whole thing began. He was doing something for his father, and he found out about this. It was fascinating, the family that’s here. Also, they’re the people who are most responsible for cream, spinach, and lima beans. Yes, I love lima beans, frozen lima beans. The Seabrooks basically made that a staple on our grocery shelves. And cream spinach made it into 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Blaine DeSantis: John’s father was, again, very, very well connected, especially with the people in Philadelphia and New York. Matter of fact, was dating Eva Gabor. Yes, Eva Gabor of Green Acres fame was, everybody thought she was going to be the next Eva Seabrook, but it didn’t turn out that way. But she was always there. Eventually, he became friends with the Kellys. And when Grace Kelly became engaged to get married over in Monaco, they asked him to go along because he knew protocol and this and that and the wines and everything. This is a fantastic story.
Blaine DeSantis: So he goes over with Grace Kelly, a contingent on the boat. And who does he meet over there? He meets a woman who’s reporting for United Press, which turns out to be the woman he marries. She was over there covering this story, too. And so we have two really interesting people. And now we have John. And John’s got a couple of brothers. And this is the story. His father, John’s father, is something else, too. He was a coachman. That’s right. He had a four-finger coachman. I don’t know what it is, but he loved horses, loved coachmen. He’d go take the family out for these picnics on the top hat and tail. He was a British guy or something like that. This is one heck of a story. One heck of a story. And for John Seabrook to want to go back into his family history and expose all the good points and the bad points, it’s certainly worth reading and listening to.
Blaine DeSantis: And now, number 136. Wow. This one was just pretty recently. This was Backpack, Jacket, Surfboard: My Journey Across America Then and Now by Graham Broyd. I see people have really enjoyed Graham’s podcast. The numbers are tremendous. This was a fascinating story about a young man, Graham Broyd, back in 1980, who won a scholarship in England to fly to America and study the Panama Canal Treaty at the Library of Congress.
Blaine DeSantis: He gets his ticket from the university where he got his scholarship, and he decided he wanted to go to see Malibu because that was the surf capital of the world back in 1980. So he sells his ticket, flies to Los Angeles. And he’s got six weeks to get all of this done. He flies to Los Angeles and now he starts hitchhiking around. He’s hitchhiking and, instead of going north to Malibu, he ends up two, three hours south in Tijuana. He has no idea how he got there. As a matter of fact, when he went back 40-some years later, he still doesn’t know how he got to Tijuana. But he got to Tijuana, the bullfights, the bull rings, and everything that was Tijuana.
Blaine DeSantis: And then he starts going north. And then eventually he ends up in Yosemite. He has to be backpacking in Yosemite. From Yosemite, he has to go down to Death Valley. He recounts a night he spent camping out in Death Valley. That was a bit of a fiasco. From there, he goes to the Grand Canyon, and he has an encounter with somebody who wants to take him to the house and help him wash his clothes. And so that’s a funny story. From there to New Orleans, he goes. He goes up to New York. By the end, he has got only enough to buy one Big Mac a day to live upon.
Blaine DeSantis: That’s right. The last six, seven days, all he can eat is one Big Mac. He makes three meals out of this one Big Mac. He starts out with the bread course. So he separates everything. He eats his bread first. Then has the salad course. And so he eats the lettuce and the tomato and all that other stuff. And finally, the meat course, the two all-beef patties. It took him 45 minutes to eat this stuff, but he had to because that was all the money he had.
Blaine DeSantis: But he found wonderful people who helped him, an Australian journalist who helped him get an interview with Howard Baker, who was basically the head and leader of the Panama Canal Treaty. He talked to him. He got a book out. He wrote a book about that eventually. He met some people up in New York who let him live in their apartment while they were somewhere else. It was a wonderful book. It’s a wonderful story.
Blaine DeSantis: And then he went back 40-some years later, 44 years later to retrace that step to see what he’s found. And Malibu’s still there. He was not a very good surfer. He didn’t go back to try it again, but he went, Malibu was there and he goes back. He still can’t figure out how he got to Tijuana. He goes back. He sees all these places. He only had 24 photos. He had to pack light and he backpacked as a hitchhiker. He backpacked. He took a smart jacket with him, which got him into Las Vegas and up with Howard Baker in Washington. But he had that with him. And he had everything he needed in his little backpack. And so it was a rough time going six weeks across America with just the backpack. So this is his story in 1980. This is his story in 2024. And it’s a wonderful book. And we’re very happy to announce that he has two more books coming out, I think, on the same thing.
Blaine DeSantis: And this is great. He found great people. We make America. We forget. We forget how great America is. We read about all the crap that goes on in Washington and everything else. Get past that. Get past the Beltway area. Get down and out, and you will find wonderful people, remarkable people who go out of their way to help you, treat you nice, tell you where to go, how to get places. He found that in 1980. He found that in 2024. Really worthwhile book. Again, Backpack, Jacket, Surfboard.
A Dive into Historical Fiction: The Marquesa and the Italian Renaissance
Blaine DeSantis: Historical fiction. One of my, I love historical fiction. Michener is one of my absolute favorite authors here. And it’s hard to find good historical fiction nowadays. I go and look at historical fiction books and it’s more historical romance. It’s Regency romance. It’s bodice rippers. That’s not for me. But last week, we had on one of the best books I have read in a long, long time, The Marquesa, by Sarah Dunant. I’m going to tell you what. This is a history. It’s a novel. It’s a biography. It is an art history book. It is about the first woman of the Italian Renaissance.
Blaine DeSantis: That’s right. She was the first Italian Renaissance woman, Isabella d’Este. And this is her story, from age six until her death, a remarkable story, which is filled in by the fact that she had written and they have found 13,000 letters that she wrote during her lifetime in a small, very small, decrepit museum. And then they found another 20,000 letters written to her. It was amazing the research that went into this about this woman who had such a nose, she became a perfume distiller herself. She became a collector of art. She became a patron of the arts, art, statuary, whatever. She ran the area where she lived because her husband was off fighting war. And so she was the diplomat.
Blaine DeSantis: You just can’t imagine how this woman did this. At six years old, they sent somebody over to interview her, would she be a suitable wife for somebody. She ended up grilling that emissary on Cicero’s one letter, all in Latin. That’s not a problem. But she had a sense of style. She created a hat, a headdress or something to wear to the Lucretia Borgia wedding. Lucretia Borgia was related to her. And she had to outshine Lucretia. So she made this hat. This hat was so popular that if you look for over 50 years, any picture of Italian noble women, matriarchs, marquesas, all were wearing a hat like this. She was a trendsetter. She did amazing stuff.
Blaine DeSantis: And Sarah Dunant is wonderful. She’s written six novels, historical fiction novels about women from the Italian Renaissance. This is the latest one. It may be her best. They are wonderful books. I really recommend. You like historical fiction? The comments we’ve gotten within the first few hours of this podcast even being put up are outstanding. People love this. They want to meet both Sarah and they want to meet Isabel d’Este through the pages of the book. Great book. Wonderful read. Again, The Marquesa, by Sarah Dunant. That is episode number 137.
Captivating Biographies: A Pentecostal Preacher and a Pop Supergroup
Blaine DeSantis: Biography is next. You got to have a few biographies in here. And oh boy, did we start the year off with a winner? Episode 103, Sister Aimee by Claire Hoffman. This is the story of Aimee Semple McPherson. Wow. Now, if you’ve never heard of Aimee Semple McPherson, she was a Pentecostal preacher. She was born in Canada, grew up there for a little bit, moved down to New York with her mother, was a child basically of the Salvation Army because her mother worked there, and eventually started becoming a preacher and she eventually worked her way across America.
Blaine DeSantis: We’ve heard so much about the Roaring ’20s, the Roaring ’20s this, the Roaring ’20s that. Not everybody was roaring, friends. Not everybody was roaring, especially in the second half of the ’20s. There was a huge Pentecostal movement coming across America at that time. People were realizing there’s more to life than drinking and partying and carousing. And Aimee Semple McPherson, she was a wonderful preacher. And by the time she got out to California, she had millions of followers. She had a mailing list, so she sent things out to them. She had her own radio station so she could do radio shows. She built her own church out there. There’s still the denomination, the Foursquare Church, is still a denomination. I think you have eight million members worldwide.
Blaine DeSantis: This is the story of Aimee Semple McPherson, which is this Greek tragedy because it’s going up, up, up, up, up and then one day it’s then a speech, she disappears. And now the whole story goes down. For 30 days, they couldn’t find her. They were sure she was lost. 20, 30, 40,000 people would show up on Venice Beach to pray, to see if they could find something with Aimee. Where was she? Had she drowned? Where was she? What could have happened? Was she kidnapped? Who knows?
Blaine DeSantis: But around 30 days later, lo and behold, she appears. Where? In Mexico. In Mexico. In Mexico. And tells this amazing story about how she was kidnapped and how she was taken to the desert and how she was kept in this tiny little shack. And then eventually she made her way out and made it to a police station and she’s back in America. And unfortunately, this has such huge publicity that now everybody wants to check out her story. And after the first couple days of, “Oh, thank God, Aimee’s back,” it’s like, something’s not working out here. Something’s not right.
Blaine DeSantis: And Claire Hoffman tells us all about these fascinating facts, the search for where was Aimee Semple McPherson and what was the story? Did she go on a vacation because she was completely exhausted? Or was it a lover’s tryst? That’s a very popular idea. But ever from that point on, her sermons changed. She became more spiteful, more angry because the government ends up bringing criminal charges against her and suing her because of all the money they expended trying to find her. And if this was a hoax, you better pay it back because we’re not going to spend all our time, effort and energy trying to find somebody who deliberately ran away.
Blaine DeSantis: Very interesting. So Aimee Semple McPherson, again, an amazing story from top to bottom, from beginning to end. It’s an amazing life she had. I’ll tell you what, this is a great, great, great biography. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, as I am, I love this stuff and I love that era of the ’20s. The fact it’s not the Roaring Twenties. I don’t want to hear about Gatsby anymore. There are other people besides Jay Gatsby. I want to hear about this other side of America. And that’s what you’re going to read here. You can’t go wrong with that.
Blaine DeSantis: Number 125, probably the most talked about show we have had with a book we’ve had this year, The Story of ABBA by Jan Gradvall. Jan is a Swedish journalist and he has had exclusive interviews with all members of ABBA. And I’m going to tell you why. He has written a story about them, and we’re not going to hear all the gory stuff, who’s doing this with what and how’s it happening, but he tells background about this group, where they came from.
Blaine DeSantis: For instance, there’s one person who’s not naturally Swedish, and that was Anni-Frid Lyngstad, the brunette. She was not Swedish. There was only one person who could read music. As a matter of fact, they think to this day, she may be the only person who could read music. That’s right. It was Agnetha Fältskog. She’s the only one who was trained. She was a trained pianist. She could read music. Matter of fact, when she sang, she felt she got a better vocal range in the recording studio when she was laying down.
Blaine DeSantis: We hear about Benny and Bjorn and the groups they started out with. The Hep Stars and the Hootenanny Singers. It’s just amazing. Bjorn was the guitar. Benny, he could play the accordion. He loved to play the accordion. And so we hear all these interesting facts about ABBA, and it’s filled in a lot of the blanks about where they came from, how did they get where they were, the fact that they were entered in Eurovision in 1973 and didn’t make it. They were going to go back in 1974. They did go back, and they changed their song. They went from, I think it was “Please, Please,” to “Waterloo,” and “Waterloo” was a winner. “Waterloo” made them win Eurovision. Oh, it got the Brits upset because it was too rock and roll and only the Brits can do rock and roll.
Blaine DeSantis: ABBA changed the course of music history and are probably more popular today than they were back then. It’s amazing. The ABBA museum, the plays, the musical, the TV, the movies, I’d say it’s just out of this world. And there are now movies about ABBA. I just was watching one the other day on Netflix. It’s the story of ABBA. It’s absolutely amazing. The schedule was crazy. It was every day they were doing something. You had Agnetha who had children. How did that go? How did she handle having children? Because Anni-Frid had a child also. How did their relationships happen? We don’t get into all the stuff about how the breakups and where, but they broke up eventually. But it was an amazing time. This was an amazing group. And they just had so many hits, so many hits. And only one number one hit. Only one of their songs ever went to number one here in the U.S., but everywhere else they were top of the charts.
Blaine DeSantis: So we follow them and we follow these people. The British, excuse me, at the beginning, the Swedish music critics didn’t like them. That wasn’t the music of the folk music. See, at the time, the Swedes were into folk music. That’s why The Hep Stars and the Hootenanny Singers, that’s why they were big. Because that was traditional, accordions, folk music. This was a break. Didn’t like that. They came around. Don’t worry.
Blaine DeSantis: Now, what I want to do is after, you got to follow me on this, friends. After they broke up, Benny and Bjorn kept working on music. As a matter of fact, they wrote a play called Chess. It made it on the West End in London. And there is a song from that called “One Night in Bangkok.” Now, I’m going to talk to my producer, Nathaniel, and we’re going to get a music video for you of that on the YouTube. We’re going to get the Murray Head music video of “One Night in Bangkok” because I want you to see what type of music they evolved into and what they could do. Not just all the type of ABBA music, but how they evolved. It’s a wonderful video. I’ll be very honest with you. And so I think you’re going to like that to see the contrast between ABBA and what they’re doing. They’re all old now. When did ABBA get old? I couldn’t believe that. It’s The Story of ABBA. It is a wonderful, wonderful book. Everybody who’s read it just raves about it. So I think you’re going to like it. I want to have it under your Christmas tree.
A Surprising Biography: The Story of Starlings in America
Blaine DeSantis: Now, this next one. I didn’t know where to put this next one. So I decided to put it under biography. When in doubt, go there. Episode number 111, the book is called Starlings. That’s right, Starlings by Mike Stark. We’ve got a book about birds. I didn’t know where to put it. But it’s really telling us all about the story about the starling here in America. It’s a biography. So Mike Stark has done an outstanding job. We got more YouTube viewers and podcast listeners to this episode than any other episode in 2025. It’s the leading one. People love the starlings.
Blaine DeSantis: This is a bird that was native to Europe. And as people emigrated from Europe to America, they missed songbirds and they missed a starling. So there’s this one gentleman who decides he’s going to introduce starlings into America. And the first three, four years, I got to be honest with you, he brought them over. They all died. Then the next year, he brought 100 over and around 20 made it. They ended up, there’s over 100 million of them now in America. They are all over. They are by far the most despised and hated birds in America because they’re loud. They poop all over. They’ve interrupted presidential inaugurations. They are everywhere in cities and farms. They eat everything they can find. They drive off native species, and yet they survive. Doesn’t matter. Climate doesn’t matter. Elevation doesn’t matter. They’re from north to south, east to west. They’re here now.
Blaine DeSantis: And so intelligent. Again, I’ve got to talk to my producer again, Nathaniel. I’ve got a wonderful, around two-minute video of a starling talking one morning. It talks. The starling can talk. And then you would swear to God you’re watching Star Wars because it sounds like it’s making R2-D2 sounds and it can mimic anything. This is one of the most intelligent birds in the world. We have spent millions and millions of dollars trying to eradicate this bird and it won’t die away. It got to the point where people were putting up dirty diapers to keep them out of the trees. That’s just something else.
Blaine DeSantis: But this is just a fascinating book. Their flying pattern, which they call murmurations, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom back and forth. Nobody, they don’t hit each other. Just somehow they have this osmotic process of knowing where the other one’s going. They follow them around. I tell you what, I have a new appreciation for starlings. I got to tell you, they’re amazing birds. I’m glad we don’t have any here where I live because they would have taken over by now. So I’m glad they’re somewhere else. But I’ll tell you what, this was a great book. I thought it might be dull, a book on birds. Guess what? It wasn’t. It was really, really fun. It was a really great read. Starlings by Mike Stark.
Exploring Nonfiction: Disappearing Traditions and 1970s American Culture
Blaine DeSantis: Nonfiction. Now I know there’s a lot of you who like nonfiction and we’re going all over the world on this one. We’re starting out with episode 105, Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein. Custodians of Wonder is about traditions or customs in locations that are starting to go extinct because people don’t do them anymore. They slowly disappear. People don’t have the patience, don’t want to do it. And so he goes through chapter by chapter different places where traditions are starting to fall apart.
Blaine DeSantis: One of the most amazing ones, I got to tell you this, is down in the Incas. There’s an Incan bridge maker. This gentleman, every year, uses grass to make grass-woven bridges across the gorges. He makes one every year. So every year he starts out, and within a year, the old one is ready to go. So he starts with this thing, and he winds these grass threads, and then he has to weave himself across the canyon there to get to the other side. Nobody wants to do this. You’re crazy. They’ve been doing it in this family for years and years. He’s the last guy doing it. He would like to have his son do it. His son’s not, he couldn’t do that at all. So he’s trying to find another person to help weave grass bridges. They can’t find anybody.
Blaine DeSantis: How about this is a good one. One of the longest democratically elected positions in Cuba, that’s right, democratically elected, is the Cuban cigar factory readers. Apparently the cigar factory workers there get bored just sitting there doing the cigars. So they elect, they have an election to choose who should be reading them books. And so this has been going on and they now have this one lady who reads them books or newspapers. Very controversial because before Castro came in, the government didn’t want them to write or read certain things. You shouldn’t read anything that might be subversive. Then Castro comes in, he doesn’t want anything the other way. But despite that, these Cuban cigar workers, they keep having their person read them the books. And that’s what she does. She reads to them every day. No one wants to do that anymore. And again, as books get in there anymore, there’s no papers hardly anymore. So that position may be going the way of the dodo, unfortunately.
Blaine DeSantis: How about the most unique pasta in the world made in Sardinia by this one woman and her sister? It is the thinnest pasta. It’s like the width of a piece of thread. The people from Barilla pasta went there to try to see if they can do it. They gave up after two weeks. Couldn’t do it. We cannot replicate it. But they make this twice a year for feast days in the middle of the country of Sardinia. And it takes like seven hours to make each, and they weave it, they thread it, they have to put it over a barrel or something or in the middle. And then it dries out there. It’s just utterly amazing. And people come from all over. All of Sardinia comes for this pasta. You’ve never seen anything like it. It’s really the most amazing thing in the world that the only two people left are these two women making this pasta. And when you read how difficult it is, you understand why nobody else wants to do it anymore.
Blaine DeSantis: How about the last of the Taiwan movie poster painters? Back in the day, they didn’t have movie posters. So they had a gentleman who painted scenes from the movies. And so that was great until now things are getting different. And he’s the last one painting anymore. Fascinating. He’s almost going blind from the oil paints he’s used. But he paints these on the second-run theaters or the people that show retrospectives, older movies. He paints this. He’s the last person to do this. People marvel at him. It’ll take him days to do a poster. And he watches the movie. Then he paints something from it. No one else wants to do it anymore. And when he dies, it’s probably going to be dying out.
Blaine DeSantis: And then there’s a Scandinavian night watchman. Again, this is a family thing, too. The last guy who goes up in the mountains there, goes up to the church and stands up there at nighttime and watches out to see what’s going on. Does anybody see the whole area? Are there fires or robberies? Ambulances? What’s happening? He is the last of the night watchman up there. It gets cold up there, to be honest with you. It gets very cold up there and nobody wants to really do this anymore. And he’s the last one. The gentleman who wrote the book, Eliot, followed him up into the steeple, which itself is a hazard to do, and eventually tells us all about this gentleman and his family. Custodians of Wonder. You can read this one chapter at a time. Very simple read. You’ll learn a lot about things. Amazing what happened and what people do in the other countries that are their traditions and their customs and which are unfortunately going the way of the dodo.
Blaine DeSantis: Now I got to go to David Krell. David Krell’s book is number and show number 119. This is Do You Believe in Magic?: The Bicentennial, Disco, and the Summer of ’76: Baseball in America in the disco era. We’re going back to 1978. And David Krell, a well-respected writer, a gentleman who I met up at Cooperstown one time. David has given us a month-by-month, what went on in 1978, both in baseball as well as in the world of culture.
Blaine DeSantis: And boy, is this fascinating because we can see what happens with, for those of you who might not know baseball, you might not know some of these names, but Bowie Kuhn was a commissioner and he negated almost every trade or deal that Charlie Finley tried to do with the Oakland A’s. Under what he called “the best interest of baseball.” He won’t let you trade this person. You didn’t get enough back for that person. They didn’t like each other. And so he kept vetoing trades. That started in January. We see Tommy Lasorda, not one of my favorites, but Lasorda, who through his sheer will hated everybody basically other than his beloved Dodgers. And he willed them to beat Sparky Anderson and the Cincinnati Reds. We hear about that. We hear about clubhouse fights. We hear about the Yankees coming back from way down, miracle finishes and eventually winning the World Series. Fantastic.
Blaine DeSantis: And then you’ve got culture. It’s not all baseball; it’s culture. Because back in April, the show debuted. It was a six-part little mini-series. The critics panned it. They said this is terrible, worst show maybe ever on television, never going to make it. That was in April. It ended up being on the fall calendar. Why? Dallas. That’s right. Dallas debuts as a little mini-series, six-part mini-series in April of 1978. Critics got that wrong.
Blaine DeSantis: Back in February of 1978, there was a huge snowstorm, a blizzard in the Northeast, which crippled that area. What did you do? You stayed at home. You couldn’t do anything. There was no internet. What happens? It was during that time period that the world was introduced to Robin Williams. That’s right. Robin Williams makes his infamous Mork appearance, Mork from Ork, on the Happy Days show, which eventually leads him into his shows, and his career just zooms up from then. But that all happened in 1978.
Blaine DeSantis: There also was disco. That’s correct. We had disco. We had anything that the Bee Gees did. The movie came out in ’77, Saturday Night Fever. But the soundtrack comes on. All of 1978 was the base of the Bee Gees soundtrack. Either they sang it, they recorded it. Somebody else was recording their music. It was out there, including the world’s worst “Disco Duck.” Terrible song by Rick Dees. But people loved it. Anyway, disco. It was everywhere. It was Gloria Gaynor. It was Donna Summers. There was great music, fun music, but it became so problematic. It became so oversaturated that by next year, in 1979, they had Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park in Chicago, which was some night where they blew up disco records. So 1978, baseball in America in the disco era. You don’t want to miss that one. That’s a lot of fun.
Compulsive Mysteries: A Bounty Hunter and the Lewis Chessmen Murders
Blaine DeSantis: I got two left. I’m sorry this is going a little bit longer everybody. Got two books left. One of the most compulsively readable books that I’ve had this year is a mystery book by Cindy F. Fariña. Episode 133 is called Danger, No Problem. Or as I say, Danger, No Problem. It features Domingo the Bounty Hunter. That’s right. How many bounty hunter books do you know out there? Not many. Not many. But here, this is just, like I said, compulsively readable. Wow.
Blaine DeSantis: I’m going to tell you what. Cindy F. Fariña is a Philippine-American citizen. She writes about Domingo, who is also her character as a Philippine-American citizen. He is a bounty hunter. He’s one of the best out there. He brings people who’ve overstayed their welcome, overstayed their visas, and takes them back to the deportation facilities. She started this book in 1995. Can you imagine that? 30 years later, it’s being published. 30 years of different points of view she had to go. She started the whole book, had it written, not the best point of view. Let’s write it through Domingo’s point of view. So he’d do that. Then it didn’t happen then. Didn’t happen then. Then things changed. Ten years later, one thing’s happened. He brings another story.
Blaine DeSantis: Because it’s a story how Domingo, while he’s very good, there’s one person, Monica Reed. Monica Reed. Domingo, that’s his kryptonite. He can’t get her. In 1995, she comes over from the Philippines. She’s a Philippine-American lineage. She comes to find her father. And the father finds out about this and wants her out. Get her out of here. Domingo eventually loses track of her. Then we follow that story 10 years later, when all of a sudden the father now wants her back in the life. So we follow for that, and that turns into a fiasco. And then another 10 years later, we follow this girl, Monica, and now the, I guess it would be her stepmother, now she wants to have her back in the life because she feels crappy about the way her husband treated her. That didn’t end good either.
Blaine DeSantis: This is just an amazing story about this gentleman and tracking down people and tracking down Monica and that story that they had. It is a well-written story. And in between, during his free time, Domingo is writing a book on ways for immigrants to stay in America and become citizens. That’s right. Because you might be reading a chapter or two, and all of a sudden, wait a minute, what is this? And it goes, the print changes, and it’s Domingo writing his book for other people. What do you need to do? It’s wonderful. It’s absolutely an amazing page-turning book. Her next one came out the exact same day, called Sunday, On the Highway. That comes out the exact same day as Danger, No Problem. I’m going to tell you what, neither book took me two days to read. I was done in a day, day and a half. These are just compulsively readable books. Cindy F. Fariña has done a wonderful job. If you have somebody who likes mysteries, police procedurals, bounty hunter books, this is the book you want to get.
Blaine DeSantis: And last but not least, and I mean it’s not least, the last book I’m talking about today is episode 123. The book is called Ivory Bones: The Lewis Chessmen Murders by Sara Winokur, who is a molecular geneticist. But she’s writing a book. She writes this book about the Lewis Chessmen murders, Ivory Bones. This is fantastic. Did you know that the Barbary pirates were up in Iceland? They were up there and they took prisoners and these Lewis chessmen. This is a true story about this chest. They’re little chess pieces that were carved out of whale ivory around 1200-1300 AD.
Blaine DeSantis: And this is a chess set. That’s why they call it a chessman. And so this woman who is being kidnapped grabs a hold of some of this stuff, and she’s being kidnapped by the Barbary pirates. The ship goes aground, and it ends up in Scotland. That’s why it’s called the Lewis, because it ends up on Lewis Island in Scotland. This is a whole background of the whole thing, because there’s murders in Iceland. Oh, yes. Because someone wants these chess pieces. Because one piece, one chess piece, they’re little, like two inches high. They’re worth a million dollars each one. So somebody is trying to connect them. There ends up being two, three murders. Friend against friend, companions against companions. This is a really fascinating book. Well-researched. Get some of the DNA into the whole stuff.
Blaine DeSantis: This is a book where I learned so much because one of these chess pieces allegedly ends up in New York, which brings the New York people over to Iceland. This was well done, really well done. Again, it’s my type of book because I learned something. I really learned something from some of these mysteries or thrillers. And I learned so much from this. It is a book I think you’re going to want to read. The Lewis Chessmen Murders. It’s called Ivory Bones. Ivory Bones by Sara Winokur.
Blaine DeSantis: And there it is, friends. My Baker’s Dozen. That’s right. The Christmas wish list of 2025. The third annual list. I can’t tell you which is the best. I can’t tell you which is the tops in any category. I can only tell you that if I got any one of these under my Christmas tree or given to me as a present, I would be ecstatic because they are wonderful books by wonderful people who do wonderful work. They really are, friends. And you can’t beat this stuff. And if you know me and you’ve been following me, you know I try to get what I like to say are real books for real people. I’m not going to give you something you need to interpret this and that. No, no, no. I’m going to use something which is really down to earth, which is going to learn something and you’re going to have a good time doing it. So anyway, on behalf of our good friends at BookTrib.com, this is Blaine DeSantis for Books and Looks, saying may all your leaves be pages in a book.
