River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

Category: Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Historical

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West Details

Review Praise for River of Shadows:“Never less than deeply intelligent, and often very close to inspired.  It belongs to that wondrous class of books – like William Gass’s On Being Blue and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet – in which an extraordinary mind seizes hold of an unexpected topic and renders it with such confidence, subtlety and grace  that one finds it hard to remember what things looked like before the book appeared in the world.” —The New York Times Book Review   “Solnit’s prose combines in individual paragraphs the imagery of a poet, the ideas of the theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive.” —The San Francisco Chronicle   “This portrait of a man, a place, a time, a technology, an art and various other matters that elude encapsulation shines on nearly every page with rigor and gusto and is consistently a delight to read.” —The Los Angeles Times Read more About the Author Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award. Read more

Reviews

I wish all biographies were morelike this, although this book is not strictly a biography. What I mean is that the focus is on the achievements and significance of the remarkable central character, Eadweard Muybridge. It was Muybridge's photographic work that led to the development of modern cinema, which Slonit recognizes as "splitting the second" and therefore as significant as splitting the atom. In the hands of a less skill author, a central character as eccentric as Muybridge could easily have overtaken the narrative. I mean he did kill a guy in a jealous rage. But the murder, the insanity defense and the legally impossible jury verdict are all contained in a single chapter. The larger story, the technological development of the 19th century, continues. We also get a close look at Leland Stanford, the beginning of the transcontinental railroad and the early history of San Francisco, although I did feel Slonit sometimes strained to connect the camera, the railroad and California into a coherent story. This is the first book I have read by this author, but it won't be the last. I was really blown away by this.

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