Pyrotechnical enough to cause brain fever, but the author’s sly hand elegantly unravels these knotty historical cloverleafs.
The serendipities that have helped shape the world as we know it today.
How did an attack on the Tripoli pirates lead to fish sticks? What did Mozart have to do with the development of the Stealth aircraft? Burke (The Knowledge Web, 1999, etc.), always intriguing, demonstrates how fabulously disparate events have impinged on one another, highlighting the effects of chance, all those unexpected novelties that come to life as the result of unforeseeable encounters. Burke keeps his weavings tight, which is not to say that they don't get dazzling to the point of blinding at times. In seeking to demonstrate the curious relationship between a fake piece of Scots culture and the development of organ transplants, for example, he guides readers from James Macpherson, 18th-century creator of the phony third-century epic, to Walter Scott and his historical novels, an American Kultur-tourist named George Bancroft, heiress and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, imperialist icon James Brooke, parish priest and social worker Charles Kingsley, “Christian Socialist on steroids” Fred Furnivall, and Oxford lecturer Hippolyte Taine, to anarchist Auguste Vaillant, whose assassination of French President Carnot inspired Alexis Carrel to devise triangulation, used by Charles Lindbergh in his perfusion pump. There is a little leap between Emil Zola and Vaillant, but it is all part of the circumstance. And this is only “Track One” of the story. Burke has arranged his material so that each chapter has an introductory paragraph and then splits into two tracks, one of which proceeds on successive left-hand pages, the other on the right. This serves to further the notion of interpenetration and reciprocity, and it is tempting to read the two tracks at one go, though it can all get wildly confusing, considering the myriad of minutiae involved.
Pyrotechnical enough to cause brain fever, but the author’s sly hand elegantly unravels these knotty historical cloverleafs.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2619-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.
One of history’s most prolific inventors receives his due from one of the world’s greatest biographers.
Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Morris (This Living Hand and Other Essays, 2012, etc.), who died this year, agrees that Thomas Edison (1847-1931) almost certainly said, “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and few readers of this outstanding biography will doubt that he was the quintessential workaholic. Raised in a middle-class Michigan family, Edison displayed an obsessive entrepreneurial spirit from childhood. As an adolescent, he ran a thriving business selling food and newspapers on a local railroad. Learning Morse code, he spent the Civil War as a telegrapher, impressing colleagues with his speed and superiors with his ability to improve the equipment. In 1870, he opened his own shop to produce inventions to order. By 1876, he had money to build a large laboratory in New Jersey, possibly the world’s first industrial research facility. Never a loner, Edison hired talented people to assist him. The dazzling results included the first commercially successful light bulb for which, Morris reminds readers, he invented the entire system: dynamo, wires, transformers, connections, and switches. Critics proclaim that Edison’s innovations (motion pictures, fluoroscope, rechargeable batteries, mimeograph, etc.) were merely improvements on others’ work, but this is mostly a matter of sour grapes. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was a clunky, short-range device until it added Edison’s carbon microphone. And his phonograph flabbergasted everyone. Humans had been making images long before Daguerre, but no one had ever reproduced sound. Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison’s inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works.
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9311-0
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A book that describes what kangaroos do and offers unusually beautiful pictures of them doing it. One old male bending forward while scratching his back looks like nothing else found in nature- -except maybe a curmudgeonly old baseball manager with arthritis in the late innings of another losing game (in fact, baseball players would appear to be the only animals who scratch themselves as much as kangaroos do—bellies, underarms, Iwago captures every permutation of scratching). At other times, they look preternaturally graceful and serene. Some of Iwago's (Mitsuaki Iwago's Whales, not reviewed) photographic compositions flirt with anthropomorphism and slyly play to our urge to see ourselves in the animals. But kangaroos are so singular that there's always something about the cant of a head or the drape of a limb that makes you think you flatter yourself that there is any kinship. They remain wondrously different.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0785-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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