Apart from his evident distaste for the “psychologically dangerous as well as practically foolish” technological...
A lively, contrarian study of the renowned inventor.
Robert Fulton, Sale tells us, was far more than the man who set the steamship upon America’s waterways—the one thing for which he is known today, nearly 200 years after his early death. As the author painstakingly demonstrates, Fulton did not invent the steamship; instead, drawing on the tenets of what Sale defines as the American dream—some of the planks of which are “Yankee know-how in service to technological improvement,” “a belief in human perfectibility and individual achievement,” and “a national destiny of expansion and conquest”—Fulton parlayed an extremely thorough knowledge of machinery and a gift for attaching himself to the ruling elite to incorporate the inventions of others into his own work (which indeed led to the development of the first truly practicable steamships). He made a considerable fortune in the process, and he took elaborate steps to defend his own patents and monopolies—but he continued to seek greater riches, and from all possible sources, from Thomas Jefferson to Napoleon Bonaparte and the British admiralty. Sale circumspectly guesses about some facets of Fulton’s character, including his insatiable desire for wealth and his amorous attachments to young men along his path. He is far more direct in his enthusiastic denunciation of industrial technologies generally, a hallmark of Sales’s writing for many years (Rebels Against the Future, 1995, etc.), and one that his readers have by now come to expect.
Apart from his evident distaste for the “psychologically dangerous as well as practically foolish” technological developments that came in Fulton’s wake, Sale has done a good job with his subject and made a solid contribution to the history of transportation and early America alike.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86715-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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