An unusual, often delightful piece of cultural history.
Journalist and first-time author Jaffe travels the fabled stretch of road connecting New York and Boston.
The Boston Post Road, writes the author, is best envisioned as “a lasso tossed from Manhattan toward the Bay, its knot landing at New Haven, wrangling southern New England.” With a purpose larger than pinpointing a particular path, he tells a three-pronged tale about transportation, commerce and communication that stretches over four centuries. Jaffe examines the ancient Indian footpaths followed by colonial messengers who wore a trail through the wilderness sufficiently established to support regular mail service by 1673. The muddy, rutted paths had by 1789 become a “loosely pebbled splendor” later trumped by turnpikes and expressways. The “King’s best highway,” once the conduit for quill-penned letters and newspapers that galvanized the American Revolution, by the 1990s featured cell-phone towers above and fiber optic wires beneath. Famous names—Winthrop, Franklin, Adams, Washington, Revere, Lincoln, FDR, P.T. Barnum—figure prominently here, but most interesting are the sketches of lesser-known characters who contributed to the highway’s legend. These include Levi Pease, the stagecoach entrepreneur and “Father of the New England Roads”; Samuel Slater and Francis Lowell, whose carding machines and power looms fueled the Northeastern industrial explosion; Albert Pope, bicycle manufacturer and agitator for better roads and highway reform; Hiram Maxim, who engineered Pope’s bicycles into horseless carriages that briefly turned the area into the world’s automotive center; and Lester Barlow, whose revolutionary idea for expressways transformed the corridor forever. Jaffe provides revealing anecdotes about the postal service’s emergence, the vogue for turnpikes, the region’s short-lived canal fever, the Boston-New York rivalry, the underrated importance of the bicycle craze, the railroad empire’s rise and fall and the political battles pitting people against highways.
An unusual, often delightful piece of cultural history.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8614-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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