Fascinating subject, so-so treatment.
Before electricity became the driving force of civilization, the public had to come to terms with this new power. Here’s the story behind it.
Simon (English/Skidmore Coll.; Genuine Reality: A Life of Henry James, 1998, etc.) draws on 19th-century newspapers, popular fiction, and other nontechnical sources to examine how electricity was understood, promoted, feared, and exploited. While magnets and static electricity were known to the ancients, no one began to systematically investigate electrical phenomena until the Enlightenment. When Luigi Galvani made frog legs twitch with an electric shock, the public imagination leapt to make a connection between electricity and life itself. Mesmerism (hypnotism), originally called “animal magnetism,” became a fad in the late-18th century, and Romantic writers like Edgar Allan Poe were quick to seize on its sensational implications. But not until the 1840s did the telegraph first put electricity to work in the world. Many in the public, working from analogy with animal magnetism, at first believed that actual thoughts were being sent along the wires, a confusion that took a long while to die out. A similar confusion between electricity and the supposed vital force that characterized living beings led to the development of “electrotherapy,” a method of treatment promoted by George Beard, a Yale-educated physician whose ideas were supported by Thomas Edison, among others. Beard and his followers prescribed mild electrical shock as a cure-all, but its use was especially recommended for neurasthenia, the Victorians’ term for depression. Meanwhile, Edison was building a reputation as a wizard, in fierce competition with George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. A key battle took place over the use of the electric chair, promoted by Edison (with exceedingly mixed motives) as a new, “humane” method of execution. At the end of the century, the discovery of X-rays—beneficial, but harmful when overused—opened new vistas of medical science. Simon dutifully touches all the bases, but fails to strike any sparks.
Fascinating subject, so-so treatment.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100586-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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