By Jeff Burns
I’ve
recently read three interesting books of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, the Gilded Age or the late Victorian period. Each was very
interesting in its own way, and each focused on a different aspect of the
period.
The Wilderness of Ruin by Roseanne Montillo, is the story of Jesse Pomeroy, a fourteen-year old Boston boy, convicted of brutal attacks and murders of local children in the 1870s. The story behind the crimes and the criminal himself is very interesting, but that’s not the entire book. Montillo paints a very vivid and detailed picture of Boston in the 1870s, the lives of several of Boston’s leading citizens including Oliver Wendell Holmes and Herman Melville, and the penal system of the time.
Houdini,
Tarzan, and the Perfect Man is an original way of looking at the time that
hadn’t occurred to me. John Kasson, the
author, selects three men - escape king Harry Houdini, the first professional
bodybuilder Eugene Sandow, and king of
the jungle Tarzan – to explore how the modern age affected white men in America
and Europe and their perceptions of what it meant to be the perfect physical
specimen, the perfect physique, the “perfect man.” He deftly relates these changes in perception
to racism and imperialism in a unique way.
The
Last Days of Night is one of the best historical novels I’ve read in a
while. It’s about the Current War
between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, a war to determine which electrical
system, AC or DC, would power the world. Throw in real characters like Nikola
Tesla, J. P. Morgan, and opera singer Agnes Huntington, and you’ve got a very
exciting story. Moore also starts each
chapter with a quotes from scientists, engineers, inventors, or
businessmen. Most of the quotes are from
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Their use
really encourages the reader to make comparisons among the men of the late 19th
century and early 21st centuries. The book whetted my appetite for biographies of Tesla
and Edison, especially Tesla.
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