Thanks to radio, radar and GPS, the “golden era” of lighthouses is over, but Levitt’s century-and-a-half saga of an...
Homage to the man who turned feeble-and-far-between harbor lights into a global multitude of brilliant beacons.
Levitt (History/Univ. of Mississippi) trains the spotlight on Augustin Fresnel (1788–1827), a French civil engineer whose early-19th-century optics experiments demonstrated that light traveled in waves, challenging leading scientists who defended particle theory. He went on to develop the Fresnel lens system, a series of triangular-shaped glass prisms in circular arrays, each prism angled to refract light into a single strong beam that projected to the horizon and beyond. Fresnel died of tuberculosis at age 39, but his legacy survived. Fresnel lenses would eventually replace the far-less-efficient lighthouses that shined light reflected from silver-mirrored parabola-shaped enclosures. However, Fresnel lenses were costly and required quality glass and precision grinding at a time in Paris when a horse powered the glassmaker’s machines. Levitt’s scrupulous scholarship and contextual setting serve readers well. She reminds us of how dangerous the sailor’s life was and how low-intensity reflectors fell far short of the brightness and depth that ships required to prevent their foundering. The author also neatly contrasts Britain with France and America. Britain was ahead of France in Fresnel’s time, already replacing horses with steam power and soon competing with the French in manufacturing Fresnel lenses. Meanwhile, America remained decades behind, thanks to a bureaucracy in which lighthouse management was in the hands of a treasury department auditor who would not use the Fresnel lenses. That changed in the 1840s with a new generation of progressives and the presidency of James Polk, ushering in massive lighthouse building with Fresnel installations—until the Civil War, when the Confederacy hid or destroyed many of them.
Thanks to radio, radar and GPS, the “golden era” of lighthouses is over, but Levitt’s century-and-a-half saga of an innovator whose ideas were at times fostered, at times thwarted, by politicians or leading scientists, is most welcome.Pub Date: June 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-06879-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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
