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Maybe someday
45
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
39/100Critics
50/100Scholars
Author:
Jim Rasenberger
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
May 26, 2020
A biography of Samuel Coltâthe inventor of the legendary Colt revolver (a.k.a. six-shooter)âwhich changed the US forever, triggering the industrial revolution and the settlement of the American West.
What The Reviewers Say
Offering a panoramic view of American culture during Colt’s life, Rasenberger covers everything from bad poetry and cholera epidemics to the politics of slavery and Western expansion. Along the way, he gives us a picture of technological change and the rise of industry. His book’s most important contribution of all: showing how this history was rooted in horrific violence and oppression.
Cleareyed and honest, Rasenberger portrays a complicated figure who combined real mechanical insight with a talent for hucksterism. His book has flaws, of course: overlong passages, too much speculation, an absence of endnotes in the print edition. (Rasenberger is posting them online.) A familiarity with recent scholarship might have produced a more sophisticated depiction of Native Americans’ shrewd responses to repeating firearms. But Revolver is rewarding biography, highlighting Colt’s place in the history of industrialization..
... a lively biography of Samuel Colt.
Rasenberger’s narrative is, to a surprising degree, the story of America in the first half of the 19th century. It overflows with relentless ambition, energy, entrepreneurship, ingenuity and wealth, and with deceit, fraud, jingoism and murder..
