Stylistically, Snow mimics the marvelously folksy, protean temperament of his subject, dwelling on Ford’s early mechanical...
Evidently fired up by Ford’s success story, former American Heritage editor-in-chief Snow (A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II, 2010, etc.) conveys his interest by delving deeply into the details of Ford’s mechanical genius.
How did he construct the simple, durable, cheap automobiles that were to transform American life for just about everybody in the first decades of the 20th century? Snow reminds readers constantly that Ford was a farmer’s son whose interest in machinery was stoked by his abhorrence for intensive farm labor and by his hope to make it less cumbersome and more efficient. Inculcated with the teachings of the McGuffey readers (stressing “truth, honesty, fair-dealing, initiative, invention, self-reliance”), Ford honed his skills in Detroit by repairing everything from watches to locomotive wheels, apprenticing in steam, electricity and gas engines, studying them all until he constructed his first gas engine in the kitchen of his first home in 1893. The horseless carriage was a burning ambition for many inventors and did exist in many forms around that time, though Ford’s gas engine earned accolades from Thomas Edison, who recognized the limits of electricity and the value of Ford’s self-contained combustion unit. Where he spun his genius was in keeping the evolving automobile available to the Everyman, rather than just as a toy for the elite. Snow frequently separates the facts from the apocryphal—e.g., that sales of Model As did not go anywhere until after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 showed the world the tremendous use of automobiles and “the soundness of Henry Ford’s idea,” and that the $5-a-day wage was not Ford’s original notion but his vice president’s.
Stylistically, Snow mimics the marvelously folksy, protean temperament of his subject, dwelling on Ford’s early mechanical inventions rather than his latter problematic prickliness, and everywhere portraying a compelling character.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4557-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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