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5+ verk 346 medlemmar 3 recensioner

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Joseph J. Corn is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Standord University.

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As expected, some remarkable pieces here. Some seemed less so, usually from later civilian air, but they were quickly read through to the next excerpt.
 
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kcshankd | Feb 21, 2019 |
Author is adept at extrapolating evidence to support his thesis that aviation became something of a secular religion, promoting both prosperity and harmony. From the day when two bicycle mechanics made the first flight at Kitty Hawk until after World War II, Americans have invested extraordinary hopes in airplanes, expecting them to revolutionize daily life and transform the world. This book reconstructs the first era of manned flight, bringing back to life the famous and lesser-known aviators who became America's heroes: Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Calbraith P. Rodgers, and many others. Abounding in fascinating detail, this book provides a vivid picture of America in the first half of the century--its aspirations and concerns--as expressed in the exuberant and often utopian response to a major new technology.… (mer)
 
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MasseyLibrary | Apr 13, 2018 |
This publication started life as the catalogue to a Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition in 1986 and then went into a paperback edition in 1996, so it must have found favour with a lot of people. It certainly looks the part, with lots of nice illustrations of early pulp sf covers, toy robots, modernist architecture, 19th and early 20th Century illustrations of futuristic cities, New York Central streamlined locomotives, weird and wonderful cars and flying machines from the 1930s to the 1950s and 60s - you know the sort of thing. It was bound to be a best-seller.

However, I found the text dense and difficult to read, even for me. It wasn't the writing style alone, although I have no problem normally with academic discourse. I think it was the landscape format and the internal layout which did not help readability on top of the fairly dry style. Once I got beyond that, I found a surprisingly small-'l' leftist perspective on the development of the vision of the future from a capitalist viewpoint. At the same time, it was highly America-centric, even when it referenced influences from the rest of the world, such as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Le Corbusier, E.M. Forster and Karel Capek amongst others. It does reference the Whirlpool 'Kitchen of the Future' and its role in the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, which became the scene of a noted debate - or some would say, slanging match - between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. This exhibition is referenced in Francis Spufford's 'Red Plenty' as an example of the wildly divergent attitudes to personal wealth and aspiration in those two countries at a time when the Soviet Union was, briefly, out-performing the USA economically.

Overall, though, this book promotes America's vision of itself as reflected in its idea of the future, even if that future was constructed from cloth from many lands. But the writers do not hesitate to point out the gaps in that vision and the implications of where that might lead. A 1950 proposal for underground bunkers to preserve business records so that commerce could continue despite nuclear armageddon is particularly unsettling. Like so much of the American Dream, it's sometimes best not to pick away too much from the facade.
… (mer)
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RobertDay | Dec 4, 2017 |

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Statistik

Verk
5
Även av
1
Medlemmar
346
Popularitet
#69,043
Betyg
4.0
Recensioner
3
ISBN
12

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