THE FIRE OF HIS GENIUS/ ROBERT FULTON AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

None of the spectators who gathered on the Hudson River shore on August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton's new steamboat. But as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in this remarkable biography, Ful ton's large, noisy, showy, fast, brash, exciting, powerful, and audacious machine would -- for better or worse -- irrevocably transf orm nineteenth-century America. Set against a brilliant portrait of a dynamic period in history, The Fire of His Genius tells the st ory of t...[Read more]