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Thirty-five years after this landmark of urban history first
captured the rise, fall, and rebirth of a once-thriving New York
City borough-ravaged in the 1970s and '80s by disinvestment and
fires, then heroically revived and rebuilt in the 1990s by
community activists-Jill Jonnes returns to chronicle the ongoing
revival of the South Bronx. Though now globally renowned as the
birthplace of hip-hop, the South Bronx remains America's poorest
urban congressional district. In this new edition, we meet the
present generation of activists who are transforming their
communities with the arts and greening, notably the restoration of
the Bronx River. For better or worse, real estate investors have
noticed, setting off new gentrification struggles.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and
visionary titans of America's Gilded Age--Thomas Edison, Nikola
Tesla, and George Westinghouse--battled bitterly as each vied to
create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In "Empires of
Light," historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and
their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science,
invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street
millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the
nation's most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the
incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world's first direct
current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention
Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who
revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the
charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough
corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of
gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful
electricity and worked heart and soul to create it.
Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC)
technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and
Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating
current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds
in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents.
The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World's Fair,
Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber--Jonnes takes us on
the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where
William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die
in the electric chair.
"Empires of Light" is the gripping history of electricity, the
"mysterious fluid," and how the fateful collision of Edison, Tesla,
and Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.
"From the Hardcover edition."
The story of the world-famous monument and the extraordinary
world's fair that introduced it
Since it opened in May 1889, the Eiffel Tower has been an iconic
image of modern times-as much a beacon of technological progress as
an enduring symbol of Paris and French culture. But as engineer
Gustave Eiffel built the now-famous landmark to be the spectacular
centerpiece of the 1889 World's Fair, he stirred up a storm of
vitriol from Parisian tastemakers, lawsuits, and predictions of
certain structural calamity.
In "Eiffel's Tower," Jill Jonnes, critically acclaimed author of
"Conquering Gotham," presents a compelling account of the tower's
creation and a superb portrait of Belle Epoque France. As Eiffel
held court that summer atop his one-thousand-foot tower, a
remarkable host of artists and personalities-Buffalo Bill, Annie
Oakley, Gauguin, Whistler, and Edison-traveled to Paris and the
Exposition Universelle to mingle and make their mark.
Like "The Devil in the White City, Brunelleschi's Dome," and David
McCullough's accounts of the building of the Panama Canal and the
Brooklyn Bridge, "Eiffel's Tower" combines technological and social
history and biography to create a richly textured portrayal of an
age of aspiration, dreams, and progress.
"Superb. [A] first-rate narrative" (The Wall Street Journal) about
the controversial construction of New York's beloved original Penn
Station and its tunnels, from the author of Eiffel's Tower and
Urban Forests As bestselling books like Ron Chernow's Titan and
David McCullough's The Great Bridge affirm, readers are fascinated
with the grand personalities and schemes that populated New York at
the close of the nineteenth century. Conquering Gotham re- creates
the riveting struggle waged by the great Pennsylvania Railroad to
build Penn Station and the monumental system of tunnels that would
connect water-bound Manhattan to the rest of the continent by rail.
Historian Jill Jonnes tells a ravishing tale of snarling
plutocrats, engineering feats, and backroom politicking packed with
the most colorful figures of Gilded Age New York. Conquering Gotham
will be featured in an upcoming episdoe of PBS's American
Experience.
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