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Charles Slack is a former business reporter & feature writer for "The Richmond Times-Dispatch" & has contributed articles to many prominent national magazines. He lives in Richmond, Virginia. (Bowker Author Biography)

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To the author Charles Slack: well done. What a great read. The writing style is eloquent, as if of that era. It sucked me right into the story.

And it is an amazing story. The origin of vulcanized rubber is fraught with betrayal and heartache, with real-life good guys and bad guys. I wouldn't be surprised to see Noble Obsession at the cinema soon.

In short, this is the best biography I've ever read, and the legacy of Charles Goodyear has another admirer.
 
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jasoncomely | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 28, 2017 |
The biography of the tenacious inventor Charles Goodyear, whose vulcanization process is synonymous with rubber. He devoted his life to working with the process to detriment of his health and his family's well-being. In debtors prison many times he never abandoned the work that burned within.
The author makes Goodyear the determined but oblivious New Englander who is very sympathetic to the reader. I put off finishing the book because I didn't want to find out what horrors awaited him, financially, physically and socially. If you ever wondered how our industrial life began this would be a great start.… (mehr)
 
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book58lover | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 13, 2015 |
Goodyear has to rank as an authentic American hero. Compulsion doesn't even begin to describe the tenacity with which Goodyear, through countless trial and error attempts tried to discover the secrets of vulcanization. One has to sympathize with his family, however, as Goodyear -- dare I say squandered in light of the result? -- his family's funds to purchase supplies, taking over the kitchen with gooey, syrupy liquid rubber, making a mess out of his personal life, facing debtor's prison and generally obsessing with rubber. Certainly, part of the motivation was money. Whoever solved the problem would become rich. Goodyear was bedeviled constantly by those wishing to steal his secrets and profit from his discoveries. The story of the legal battle for control of the patent is equaling riveting.

Slack turns what one would think to be a boring subject into a fascinating read (or listen in my case) as he weaves the technical, social, and political aspects together into a fine narrative.
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ecw0647 | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Sep 30, 2013 |
Hetty Green was known as The Witch of Wall Street around 1890, as she dressed in shabby old black gowns and outdated bonnets while she saw to her business about New York's financial district. I first read about her in The People's Almanac as a kid and thought she was fascinating, as did every newspaper during her decades as the wealthiest woman in America. She had an amazing business sense, which she gained from her wealthy father, to know when a piece of real estate or a bond would be valuable in the future and to keep her head when the stock market plunged. There were several times when NYC approached and received loans from Hetty Green of over a million dollars to keep public services running.

There are many stories about her greed and some are true. She actually did dress herself and her children as paupers to receive free medical attention. Sometimes she was recognized and made to pay the bill, which made her furious. She would haggle with merchants and waiters over charges as low as 15 cents at a time when she owned a railroad and some of the most valuable property on Michigan Ave. She refused to pay for a cab, instead walking miles every day to the bank. And she was suspected of forging her aunt's signature to a will that cut out most of the beneficiaries after the woman's death.

The surprises in this book are that Hetty actually did let go of some of her money, giving large anonymous donations to charities and speaking out for the working class. And the full story concerning her son's damaged leg is here.The claim that has been printed so many times- that she allowed the boy's leg to go without medical treatment until it had to be amputated rather than pay a doctor- is untrue. A very interesting read.
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