Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503040025
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY LARRY SHIELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By David E. Fisher. Random House. $23.
Having experienced four of the five major natural disasters extant in North America - tornado, flood, earthquake, hurricane and volcanic eruption (the one I missed so far) - I agree with the author that a hurricane is ``The Scariest Place on Earth.'' Author David E. Fisher survived hurricane Andrew, the behemoth storm that hit Florida in August 1992. Using his first hand knowledge of Andrew and anecdotal evidence about storms from the time of Columbus on, Fisher describes how hurricanes form, how they gather strength, why predictions about direction usually fail, and the hours-long terror of surviving a storm.
Read this book, skip the experience.
Edison: inventing the century.
By Neil Baldwin. Hyperion. $27.95.
No single man has influenced the 20th century more than Thomas Edison. His 1,000 patents ranging from the electric light bulb to the phonograph to the motion picture impact both leisure and labor time. Until this biography, the only view the world had of Edison was in a pair of books authorized by the man himself, and two films starring Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy as the kindly inventor. Little was written about the personal side of Edison's life involving two wives, six children and little happiness.
Little was written about the errors in judgments in which Edison saw no utility in the telephone, thought radio was a craze, and believed that direct current was a better solution for power transmission that George Westinghouse's alternating current solution. With direct current, each neighborhood 2 miles square would require its own generating plant. Imagine a world where next to every 7-Eleven convenience store was a smoke belching coal burning generating plant. Well into the 1960s large sections of New York City were still burdened with a DC electrical system which required inverters to connect any refrigerator or television to the power grid.
By not hiding Edison's weaknesses, Baldwin humanizes the myth of the Wizard of Menlo Park. Being introduced to his failures only enhances his prodigious successes.
Two Seconds under the World.
By Jim Dwyer and David Kocieniewski, Diedre Murphy, Peg Tyre. Crown. $24.
The two seconds alluded to the title are the two seconds required for the complete detonation of the bomb planted under the World Trade Center by Muslim fanatics. The bomb killed six, and closed the WTC for weeks while damage was repaired. The book was compiled by four reporters from New York Newsday, a well- respected daily paper published on Long Island. I hope the paper reads better than this book. It just doesn't flow. The subject is interesting, and the authors shared a Pulitzer prize for local reporting, but the amalgam doesn't work.
Even more upsetting are the conclusions drawn by the authors. With the benefit of hindsight, they conclude that the only reason the bombing succeeded was that all government agencies involved conspired to bungle investigations dating from three years previous to the attack. Journalism can easily point to mistakes made in investigations and weave a scenario showing how these mistakes made caused certain results.
What journalism rarely points out is that these investigations are undertaken separately, and collating all the leads from all the investigations pointing toward a conspiracy against the WTC is an impossible task - almost as impossible as having these same journalists collating their individual notes on all the same investigations to predict the same conspiracy. The FBI missed it, but then so did Newsday.
Drawing The Line: tales of maps and cartocontroversy.
By Mark Monmonier. Henry Holt. $27.50.
Of all things controversial present in society today, maps appear to be far down on any scale. Not so according to Mark Monmonier in this well written, well illustrated, well documented overview on the cartographer's art. What Monmonier points out - a fact not usually recognized - is that maps are not just the Mercator projections found in school rooms; they're also zoning plats, congressional district lines and real property lines. Maps define EPA hazard areas. Maps determine escape routes from nuclear power plants. Maps define where landfills are located. How maps are drawn defines quality of life for everyone. Monmonier explains how maps, some fraudulent, have altered political and intellectual thought for years. After reading this book, maps must be looked at critically, and not just a way to drive between Roanoke and Hiwassee.
Larry Shield trains dogs and horses in Franklin County.
by CNB