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Laddar... Inventing Modern: Growing up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfinsav John H. Lienhard, IV
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. This is as much memoir as history, and works surprisingly well as both. While not offering a formal definition, Lienhard's take on the spirit of "modern" is largely that of boyish high adventure and daring intersecting with the cutting edge technology of the first half the 20th century. When two world wars and atomic weapons destroyed the adventure of it all, and replaced it with fear, then the alienation often associated with modernity begins for the author, with the question next being when will our culture regain its confidence. ( ) inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern, John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern. Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco,skyscrapers, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Buck Rogers, the culture of the open road--Burma Shave, Kerouac, and White Castles--lie driving forces that set this account of Modern apart.One force, says Lienhard, was a new concept of boyhood--the risk-taking, hands-on savage inventor. Driven by an admiration of recklessness, America developed its technological empire with stunning speed. Bringing the airplane to fruition in so short a time, for example, were people such asKatherine Stinson, Lincoln Beachey, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh. The rediscovery of mystery powerfully drove Modern as well. X-Rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory had followed electricity and radium. Here we read how, with reality seemingly altered, hope seemed limitless.Lienhard blends these forces with his childhood in the brave new world. The result is perceptive, engaging, and filled with surprise. Whether he talks about Alexander Calder (an engineer whose sculptures were exercises in materials science) or that wacky paean to flight, Flying Down to Rio,unexpected detail emerges from every tile of this large mosaic.Inventing Modern is a personal book that displays, rather than defines, an age that ended before most of us were born. It is an engineer's homage to a time before the bomb and our terrible loss of confidence--a time that might yet rise again out of its own postmodern ashes. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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