This book is about some of the largest events of the twentieth
century, about international war, economic collapse, new science
and technologies, and about the transformation of an old milltown
region into a modern American metropolis. But it sees those
sweeping changes through the eyes of fourteen particular
Bostonians, in an ambitious attempt to understand the disorienting
experiences of recent history. These lives span the years from 1850
to 1980, a time when Boston, like all American cities, was being
rebuilt according to the continually changing specifications of
science, engineering, mass wealth, and big corporations.
From Boston Brahmins to self-made millionaires, Warner brings us
into the diverse worlds of Robert Grant, judge and popular
novelist; Mary Antin, mystic and advocate for immigrants; Fred
Allen, radio comedian; Charles A. Stone and Edwin S. Webster,
electrical engineers; Laura Elizabeth Richards, reformist
clubwoman; Emily Greene Balch, economist and winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize; William Madison Wood, textile magnate; Fred Erwin
Beal, socialist labor organizer; Louise Andrews Kent, suburban
housewife and writer; Vannevar Bush, science administrator;
Laurence K. Marshall, electronics entrepreneur; James Bryant
Conant, university president and educational reformer; and Rachel
Carson, renowned science writer.
These varied lives have been deftly brought together to
illuminate the many contradictory qualifies of today's metropolitan
life: ambitions for education and pervasive social neglect;
conspicuous luxuries and endemic poverty; elaborate science and a
poisoned environment; far-reaching cooperative networks of
strangers and narrow, segregatedneighborhoods; the multiplication
of women's roles and the entrapment of women in the home.
Individual experience-how one person lived as a child in a
family and in a particular place, how people did their work-can
bring renewed insight to the conflicts of modern life. This
engrossing story speaks from an urge to recapture history through
human lives and to examine its meaning as authentic experience. As
Alfred Kazin expresses it, we are a nation of men and women who
have endeavored to escape traditions, and therefore self-discovery
is our preoccupation and delight.
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