Photo: Chaiel Schaffel/WBZ NewsRadio
BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — An author from Reading has just released her very first book.
A lunch party will be held this weekend at Haven Street's Writer's Collaborative Learning Center to celebrate the release of the book: “Place Names in Boston and Beyond: Tongue Twisted Town Tales.”
Written by Amanda Rotondo, the book started hitting bookshelves last week.
Rotondo said the book is full of untold stories of Massachusetts towns along with the strangely pronounced names including Woburn, Reading, Stoneham, and Quincy. "Each of these towns has its own personality, and part of what makes up the town's personalities are these incredible stories that somehow have gotten lost in time."
She described the book as part guide, part history, with some sarcastic musings mixed in.
The book includes some of the more bizarre pronunciations of towns and cities that only locals would know, such as 'Quincy,' home of the iconic 'Dunkin.' "What I didn't know is that the donut was invented by a guy who lived in Quincy for a time," Rotondo said.
Also in the book, the inside story behind the somewhat out-of-place huge statue of Leif Erikson on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.
Rotondo writes it's because a Harvard Professor of Chemistry named Ebon Norton Horsford and a group of intellectuals he hung around with back in the late 1800s didn't want Christopher Columbus to be the one who discovered America.
Horsford paid for the bronze statue of Erickson with his own money.
WBZ NewsRadio's Chaiel Schaffel (@CSchaffelWBZ) reports.