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
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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