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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
