An authoritative but dull chronicle of a colorful industry that leaches out most of the interesting parts of one of the...
A prominent British historian maps out the tricky, messy, world-changing history of the gas-powered automobile.
In this straightforward history of cars, Parissien (Interiors: The Home Since 1700, 2008, etc.) begins by offering a concise origin story of the birth of the modern car and then launches into the oft-told tales of the slick behemoths who brought the product to the mainstream. “The men who were responsible for the creation and development of the global car industry were, for the most part, enthusiastic experts or fast-talking salesmen—or, like Henry Ford, a bit of both,” writes the author. “Many of the first auto pioneers were larger-than-life characters.” In addition to Ford, Parissien looks at the men who are mostly known as brand names today, including the rakish Louis Chevrolet, the brilliant engineers Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, and the French pioneer Armand Peugeot. Focusing on the characters involved in this great drama would have led to more inspired storytelling, but the historian in the author is far too ingrained. He pulls the focus way back to give an undemanding accounting of the industry’s peaks and valleys and the resulting effects on the social structures of America, Europe and Asia. There are a few entertaining moments—Parissien clearly understands the symbolism of the car as sex symbol—and there are nods to the cults of Volkswagen’s Beetle and the Mini Cooper, as well as well-known iconography like Steve McQueen’s Shelby Mustang in Bullitt, James Bond’s Aston Martin, and the DeLorean DMC-12 and its prominence in the Back to the Future movies. However, the step-by-step narrative, pulled almost entirely from secondary sources, is a grind.
An authoritative but dull chronicle of a colorful industry that leaches out most of the interesting parts of one of the world’s great pastimes.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04063-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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