An amusing account of celebrity travelers through the primitive and yet vaguely familiar America of 100 years ago.
Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, road-tripping buddies.
Beginning in 1914, the two American icons took yearly automobile trips through the countryside. Even though they didn’t accomplish much of note during these trips, journalist Guinn (The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, 2017) tells an entertaining story that mixes sharp portraits of their vivid personalities with details of their travels and a portrait of American society during those years. Although past his prime, Edison was universally worshipped as the world’s greatest inventor, while Ford was at his peak, having developed an automobile cheap enough for the middle-class families who bought it in droves. Idolizing the older man, Ford had requested an autographed photograph in 1911. A visit to Edison’s New Jersey lab soon followed, and the two hit it off. Ford accepted an invitation to Edison’s retreat in Florida, where they drove to the Everglades, which was then a trackless wilderness. Although this initial trip was an unpleasant experience, it began a yearly series of auto journeys. Edison and Ford were usually accompanied by Harvey Firestone (of Firestone Tires), a wealthy entrepreneur happy to serve as Ford’s factotum, organizing the itinerary. No ascetic, Ford paid for several vehicles filled with camping and cooking equipment, servants, and a chef that accompanied them. While Ford often stayed in hotels, Edison roughed it. According to Guinn, few Americans in 1914 ventured into the hinterland, a nearly roadless, exotic, often impoverished setting. Ten years later, thanks partly to enthusiastic newspaper coverage, “autocamping” became the rage, the recognizable America of campgrounds, motels, diners, and gas stations took shape, and the vagabonds themselves faded from headlines in favor of the latest 1920s idols. “A contributing factor to the end of the trips wasn’t the Vagabonds’ expectation of too much attention being paid to them, but too little,” writes the author.
An amusing account of celebrity travelers through the primitive and yet vaguely familiar America of 100 years ago.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5930-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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