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Inventing modern : growing up with x-rays, skyscrapers, and tailfins /

Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern, John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern. Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco, skyscraper...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Clasificación:Libro Electrónico
Autor principal: Lienhard, John H., 1930-
Formato: Electrónico eBook
Idioma:Inglés
Publicado: New York : Oxford University Press, 2003.
Colección:OUP E-Books.
Temas:
Acceso en línea:Texto completo
Descripción
Sumario:Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern, John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern. Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco, skyscrapers, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Buck Rogers, the culture of the open road-Burma Shave, Kerouac, and White Castles-lie driving forces that set this account of Modern apart. One force, says Lienhard, was a new concept of boyhood-the risk-taking, hands-on savage inventor. Driven by an admiration of recklessness, America developed its technological empire with stunning speed. Bringing the airplane to fruition in so short a time, for example, were people such as Katherine Stinson, Lincoln Beachey, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh. The rediscovery of mystery powerfully drove Modern as well. X-Rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory had followed electricity and radium. Here we read how, with reality seemingly altered, hope seemed limitless. Lienhard blends these forces with his childhood in the brave new world. The result is perceptive, engaging, and filled with surprise.; Whether he talks about Alexander Calder (an engineer whose sculptures were exercises in materials science) or that wacky paean to flight, Flying Down to Rio, unexpected detail emerges from every tile of this large mosaic. Inventing Modern is a personal book that displays, rather than defines, an age that ended before most of us were born. It is an engineer's homage to a time before the bomb and our terrible loss of confidence-a time that might yet rise again out of its own postmodern ashes.
Descripción Física:1 online resource (ix, 292 pages) : illustrations
Bibliografía:Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-283) and index.
ISBN:1423784278
9781423784272
1280532580
9781280532580
9780198036364
0198036361
9780195160321
0195160320
9786610532582
6610532583