Michael A. Hiltzik

Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America by Michael Hiltzik, is a fantastic 5*book on the Gilded Age specifically dealing with building of the great railroad empires. The book tosses about some familiar names Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan Jay Gould, Jim Fisk and one unfamiliar with me in E.H. Harriman.

A fantastic book that deals speaks of some of the familiar stories such as how Fisk and Gould tried to get one over on the Commodore and the Trust Busting of Theodore Roosevelt. Truly a fantastic book on the making, merging and running of the Train Trusts in the 1800's through early 1900's.

Including the Epilogue it runs only 379 pages, but a fast read that I heartily endorse for all interested in the empire building of the Gilded Age.… (más)

I was a bit of an accelerator groupie in my high school years, the early 1970s. I got to hang out a bit at both Argonne National Lab and Fermilab. I went on to get a Master's degree... ABD.. but that was theoretical condensed matter physics, so I drifted pretty far from the bubble chambers!

I really enjoyed this book. It's a pretty easy read. Hiltzik doesn't really wander off track: what did E. O. Lawrence do? There's a bit of physics in the book, but very little. No formulas at all. For example, we hear a little about how K-capture cross section varies with atomic number but we don't pick up any insight as to why. This is not a physics book! It might well whet a person's appetite to learn some physics though.

This is really a book about people.

I actually got to hang out with a few of the people in this book back when I was in college. I attended a bunch of physics seminars where hot shot young physicists would present the latest hot thing. Eugene Wigner was ancient by then but he'd sit up front and ask these hilarious questions... "Excuse me, this is all way beyond me, but back there on line 2, didn't you forget a minus sign?" The hot shot would run weeping from the room. Of course I exaggerate. But Hiltzik gives a story here about a much younger Wigner that really captures that same spirit. So I can say from personal experience... the stories in this book about people... they're really worthwhile!… (más)

Maps were a challenge - relying on the Rand McNally Road Atlas and the Readers Digest Atlas, as many rail lines are not there and former key junctions (like Cairo Illinois) are tiny towns. Google can provide historical pictures of a lot of the infrastructure, and unexpected long tails with the descendants of the principals. Jay Gould’s great great grandson is an Irish lord with an interest in the only graveyard in Portugal that commemorates the fallen in the Peninsula War. The book is an excellent pathway through US industrial development, in parallel with the weightier accounts by White, Altschuler and Urofsky - and the biographies of Duveen. Also a magnificent narrative - Harriman and John Muir, what an unlikely pair.… (más)