RUBBER'S GOODYEAR

Biography of the man who was first to make rubber really useful, and it is really almost an incredible story, with the heartbreaking setbacks he had to endure one after another -- the failure of process after process, the famous trial in which Daniel Webster defended Goodyear against Horace Day, the death of Goodyear's wife, the Mackintosh suit... etc., etc. Good reading and real enough where the mechanical, legal, experimental, aspects of the man's career are concerned, but stilted and synthetic when it touches on his family, and on Goodyear as husband and father. This in content and scope belongs also in fiction for fifteen and up.