A shocking tale of Edison's sleazy side
But there's a story behind the electric chair. At the end of the 19th century, two emerging power companies were grappling over the emerging market for electrical power.
Thomas Edison's direct current took an early lead but was rapidly overtaken by the advantages of alternating current offered by his competitor, Westinghouse.
In "Executioner's Current," Richard Moran carefully details Edison's remarkably sleazy efforts to discredit alternating current (and Westinghouse) by developing the electric chair, covertly lobbying New York to embrace the new technology and — most important — utilizing alternating current to operate the chair. Edison then sought to disparage alternating current by dubbing it the "executioner's current," far too dangerous for common use.
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Although Edison won the legal battle and the electric chair was adopted by numerous states, he lost the commercial fight as alternating current overtook direct current and became the U.S. standard for electricity. Edison's underhanded efforts and his role as the father of the electric chair have largely been overshadowed by his contributions as the classic American entrepreneurial inventor.
"Executioner's Current" aims to set the record straight. As this thoughtful volume attests, Edison left behind a deadly legacy: More than 4,300 people have been executed in the electric chair in the United States, more than all other methods of execution combined. And the debate over the mechanics of the death penalty still rages.
— Kevin J. Hamilton
Dramatizations of Julius Caesar's life usually focus on his liaison with Cleopatra and his assassination. Conn Iggulden's debut novel, "Emperor: The Gates of Rome," chooses to deal with his coming-of-age, which must have been remarkably eventful.
"How," Iggulden asks, "did a young man recover from the disaster of being on the losing side in a civil war to the point where his very surname came to mean king?" While historians don't know enough to answer the question, that doesn't stop Iggulden from suggesting the precocious nature of an adolescent Caesar whose uncle, Marius, is known to have fought with another powerful general, Sulla, for control of Rome in 88 B.C.
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The early scenes, in which the boys take on a bullying neighbor, are so violent, and so insistent on the inherently brutal nature of young men, that they suggest "Fight Club B.C." While Iggulden can be a pedestrian writer of dialogue, he excels at describing battle scenes both small-scale and epic. Sulla's ruthless invasion of Rome becomes the book's most compelling episode.
Iggulden is less persuasive when he's creating characters, especially women, who come off as either sketchy (Caesar's deranged mother, a slave girl who enchants both boys) or frustratingly colorless (Caesar's young wife). Perhaps there will be more room for them in the sequel, which Iggulden sets up with a final twist that is as gimmicky as it is tantalizing.
— John Hartl
"Everywhere I go," Flannery O'Connor once said, "I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner ("Angle of Repose") would surely not agree. For 44 years he taught creative writing, and his students included Ernest Gaines, Edward Abbey, Tillie Olsen, Larry McMurtry, Raymond Carver and Ken Kesey. If he felt dogged by the attitude behind O'Connor's quote, it didn't show. He wrote fiction, taught fiction, but never wrote much about writing and teaching fiction. What little writing he did on the subject has now been collected in a posthumous work edited by his daughter-in-law, "On Teaching and Writing Fiction," which comes in at a slim 120 pages.
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One of the best nonpublished pieces, "On the Teaching of Creative Writing," is in Q&A form, and is based upon taped-recorded discussions at Dartmouth College in 1988. Like everything Stegner wrote, it is concise, thoughtful, and struggles for the humane. Talent can't be taught, he says, but it can be awakened. Young writers should be encouraged to write but discouraged from thinking they are writers. They should be able to take blunt criticism. "You don't sharpen a knife on a cake of soap," he says.
For all of Stegner's articulation, though, the book is just too slim and uneven for the average reader. I imagine its audience as students and teachers of creative writing, and Stegner completists.
— Erik Lundegaard
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A domino is a loose cloak with a mask for the upper part of the face, worn to conceal identity. This easy, somewhat sinister, disguise is key to the story of George Cautley, a poor but gifted young artist who arrives in London to seek his fortune.
The time is the mid-18th century, shortly after the South Sea Bubble has burst, impoverishing many of London's formerly rich citizens, and the Black Plague has left its mark. It is a time of masquerades that conceal the wearers' age, skin condition, social status and gender. Philosopher David Hume is not alone in raising questions about human identity.
Cautley meets the beautiful and mysterious Lady Beauclair, whose portrait he agrees to paint. As he paints, she tells him the story of Tristano, an Italian castrato whose silvery voice captivated London before he abruptly dropped out of sight. Cautley also apprentices himself to a well-known portrait artist; a kindly man who unaccountably mistreats a young model whom he keeps in a cold, vermin-infested studio. Out in the world, a mysterious gentleman in a gold-laced tricorn hat, who would seem to be a friend of Lady Beauclair's, repeatedly offends Cautley.
King is so well-versed in the ways of 18th-century London that his colorful descriptions of its manners and eccentricities of dress run on to great and amusing length. The reader is immersed in minutiae.
The problems of "Domino" lie not in its story or its style, but in its convoluted structure. It begins with an older Cautley telling his story to a youth. That involves repeating Lady Beauclair's story, as she tells Tristano's history. Added to that are the histories of several other characters, all "scandalous."
The constant juggling of these histories often makes it difficult to place characters in the proper time and context. King doubtless intended it that way, but it requires a clear mind and strict attention from the reader.
The ending was not only stranger than I predicted, but stranger than anyone (other than David Hume) could have predicted.
— Deloris Tarzan Ament