A powerful story that contrasts soaring hopes with the anchors of ego and courtroom.
At the dawn of powered flight, the warfare for the air was as intense, if not as sanguinary, as war in the air would one day become.
Goldstone—author or co-author of more than a dozen fiction and nonfiction titles (Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1965–1903, 2010, etc.)—returns with a story little known to those unversed in aviation history: the battle Orville and Wilbur Wright fought with Glenn Curtiss to dominate the aviation market in the early years of the 20th century. Both would win and lose. After a brief prologue, Goldstone returns to the early theories and attempts at manned flight—Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo have cameos. The author then leaps to the late 19th century, then swiftly to Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers would achieve their immortality in 1903. He takes us through their design innovations and their false starts and hopes, and despite his patent admiration for the brothers, Goldstone also describes a surprising intransigence and even truculence in them. He then shifts focus to Curtiss (and ping-pongs back and forth between his two subjects the rest of the way), who was a brilliant designer, as well. The author describes the controversy between his two principals: Early in their relationship, a relationship that moved from amicable to hostile, did Curtiss steal ideas? The author then glides above history, directing our attention to the phenomenon of the air show, aerial competitions, the innovations in design, the crashes, the deaths and the slow emergence of women aviators. He also describes the grotesque determination of spectators to retrieve pieces of wreckage, even moments after a fatal crash. The Wright brothers became embroiled in countless lawsuits with Curtiss and others as history inevitably flew away from them.
A powerful story that contrasts soaring hopes with the anchors of ego and courtroom.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53803-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
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
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