A sturdy, illuminating biography.
A biography of the man who helped design and build one of the most iconic bridges in America.
John Roebling planned much of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, but he died in 1869, just before scheduled construction. The project fell to his son, Washington (1837-1926), and it took 14 years. New Statesman contributing writer Wagner (Seizure, 2007, etc.) chronicles the story of a father’s influence on the son and the son’s influence on his own family. There are plenty of texts about the Roeblings and their bridge—notably, David McCullough’s The Great Bridge (1972)—but this portrait has the advantage of Washington’s recently recovered memoir of life with his father. With contemporary notes, clippings, and letters, too, it makes a fascinating tale. John, who came to America to establish a village and then a wire mill, was extremely strict, and he was cheap. He was certain that copious water would cure every illness, and he was a devout spiritualist. A Rensselaer engineer, Washington was at Gettysburg, the Battle of the Crater, and the Wilderness. He was discharged as a colonel, a title he kept ever after. Washington’s marriage was legendary. When he became incapacitated with the bends while working on the bridge, his wife, Emily, acted as his amanuensis, relaying his detailed instructions to workers on the site. Wagner recounts the festivities in Manhattan and Brooklyn when the bridge opened in 1883, but she fails to mention the widely reported panic, barely a week later, when the general public was invited to walk the span without the set fee of a penny. Many died or were injured by the crush. Washington’s fortune grew with the Roebling wire mill, which supplied the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh with wire for their aircraft and thousands of miles of cable wire for the George Washington Bridge. Washington remarried after Emily’s death and grew to be a hypochondriac, stingy old man, and he died in the summer of 1926, just short of his 90th birthday.
A sturdy, illuminating biography.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62040-051-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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