A first-rate, well-balanced blend of personal and cultural history.
A superbly rendered life of the painter, sculptor, and photographer best known for his invention of the electromagnetic telegraph.
When he wasn’t busy inventing or making art, Samuel Morse fretted about the nature of God, the shortcomings of those closest to him, and the hidden agenda of Abraham Lincoln. That he was brilliant, suggests Silverman (Houdini, 1996, etc.), is beyond doubt: though his early academic record was mediocre, he distinguished himself as a student at Yale, learning the mysteries of “galvanic electricity” and polishing his skills as a painter, one of the best of his time. He also left school with a mountain of debts, establishing a theme that figures throughout Silverman’s pages: brilliant though he was, Morse seemed incapable of handling money, and it was not until late in his long life that he finally was able to make a living from his considerable inventions. He worried about this lack of financial ability, but about many other things as well: that his parents would think him “a terrible harum-scarum fellow” for having gotten quickly engaged to a woman whose fondness for waltzing and Unitarian leanings troubled him (“She believes in the truth of the gospel, but I fear it is only a speculative belief”); that French inventors were conspiring to rob him of his patents; that America was so hostile to artists that he would have to relocate to Mexico, where the upper classes appreciated good painting. Having hit on the happy idea that “intelligence might . . . be transmitted instantaneously by electricity,” however, Morse stumbled into fame and eventually fortune. Morse’s well-known telegraph—of “What hath God wrought?”—was, writes Silverman, “the subject of relatively as much discussion in the newspapers and magazines of the mid-1840s as the Internet became in the mass media of the 1990s,” and even more transformative.
A first-rate, well-balanced blend of personal and cultural history.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40128-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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