Author: Degna Marconi
Publisher: Guernica Editions
ISBN: 9781550711516
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
The daughter of Guglielmo Marconi draws upon her father's personal journals and letters as well as from scientific and historical records to chronicle the life and profession of the internationally known inventor.
Author: Alexandra Styron
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416595066
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, READING MY FATHER IS THE STORY OF A DAUGHTER COMING TO KNOW HER FATHER AT LAST— A GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE. In Reading My Father, William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem. From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.
Author: Maria Cristina Marconi
Publisher: Branden Books
ISBN: 9780937832394
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
When in 1895 twenty-one-year-old Guglielmo Marconi made his first wireless transmission over land, he became the boy wonder of the world. When subsequently, he made similar transmissions across the Atlantic Ocean, thus proving to the world that his radio-related inventions had immediate and wide-spread applications for all of humanity, young Marconi ushered in the Age of Communication. The life, the works, the character of one of the greatest scientists of this Century, Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the Radio, are described in this carefully documented, impassioned and deeply involved book by an exceptional witness: his wife Maria Cristina. He was called 'The genius who gave a voice to silence'. Acclaimed by the whole world, the recipient of the most prestigious honours and decorations, he never lost his innate modesty and discretion even at the height of his success.
Author: Gavin Weightman
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0786748540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
The world at the turn of the twentieth century was in the throes of "Marconi-mania"-brought on by an incredible invention that no one could quite explain, and by a dapper and eccentric figure (who would one day win the newly minted Nobel Prize) at the center of it all. At a time when the telephone, telegraph, and electricity made the whole world wonder just what science would think of next, the startling answer had come in 1896 in the form of two mysterious wooden boxes containing a device one Guglielmo Marconi had rigged up to transmit messages "through the ether." It was the birth of the radio, and no scientist in Europe or America, not even Marconi himself, could at first explain how it worked -- it just did. And no one knew how far these radio waves could travel, until 1903, when a message from President Theodore Roosevelt to the king of England flashed from Cape Cod to Cornwall clear across the Atlantic.Here is a rich portrait of the man and his era-and a captivating tale of science and scientists, business and businessmen. There are stories of British blowhards, American con artists-and Marconi himself: a character par excellence, who eventually winds up a virtual prisoner of his worldwide fame and fortune.
Author: Marc Raboy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199313601
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 888
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Book Description
A little over a century ago, the world went wireless. Cables and all their limiting inefficiencies gave way to a revolutionary means of transmitting news and information almost everywhere, instantaneously. By means of "Hertzian waves," as radio waves were initially known, ships could now make contact with other ships (saving lives, such as on the doomed S.S. Titanic); financial markets could coordinate with other financial markets, establishing the price of commodities and fixing exchange rates; military commanders could connect with the front lines, positioning artillery and directing troop movements. Suddenly and irrevocably, time and space telescoped beyond what had been thought imaginable. Someone had not only imagined this networked world but realized it: Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy shows us in this enthralling and comprehensive biography, Marconi was the first truly global figure in modern communications. Born to an Italian father and an Irish mother, he was in many ways stateless, working his cosmopolitanism to advantage. Through a combination of skill, tenacity, luck, vision, and timing, Marconi popularized--and, more critically, patented--the use of radio waves. Soon after he burst into public view at the age of 22 with a demonstration of his wireless apparatus in London, 1896, he established his Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company and seemed unstoppable. He was decorated by the Czar of Russia, named an Italian Senator, knighted by King George V of England, and awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics--all before the age of 40. Until his death in 1937, Marconi was at the heart of every major innovation in electronic communication, courted by powerful scientific, political, and financial interests. He established stations and transmitters in every corner of the globe, from Newfoundland to Buenos Aires, Hawaii to Saint Petersburg. Based on original research and unpublished archival materials in four countries and several languages, Raboy's book is the first to connect significant parts of Marconi's story, from his early days in Italy, to his groundbreaking experiments, to his protean role in world affairs. Raboy also explores Marconi's relationshps with his wives, mistresses, and children, and examines in unsparing detail the last ten years of the inventor's life, when he returned to Italy and became a pillar of Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Raboy's engrossing biography, which will stand as the authoritative work of its subject, proves that we still live in the world Marconi created.
Author: Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143844527X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
Finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography Category presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation This vivid memoir speaks the intense truth of a Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her father's lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World War II. At four years old, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen, on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. Thus began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by the lessons of lasagna vows, and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to New York City's gay club scene of the '80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from underneath the dining room table to the stoop, the sidewalk, the street, and, ultimately, out into the wide world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, domestic violence, and a vast array of Italian American characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide, this journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of a peasant, immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest essence of soul.
Author: Calvin D. Trowbridge
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781439263907
Category : Electrical engineers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
At age 38, Marconi dominated pre-WWI long distance wireless. The prize: forced divestiture to RCA. Undaunted, he developed new technology that is the basis of today's wireless world.
Author: Hugh G.J. Aitken
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400857880
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
This book offers a readable narrative of the science and technology of early radio combined with sociological and economic analysis of how radio changed our lives. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Richard Russo
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307267903
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 546
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes "a magnificent, bighearted” novel (The Boston Globe) about small-town America that follows Louis Charles Lynch (“Lucy”) and his wife of forty years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy is sixty years old and has spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be—chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an “empire” of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the “history” he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.
Author: J. Emmett Winn
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817351752
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
The essays included in this collection represent some of the best cultural and historical research on broadcasting in the U. S. today. Each one concentrates on a particular event in broadcast history--beginning with Marconi's introduction of wireless technology in 1899. Michael Brown examines newspaper reporting in America of Marconi's belief in Martians, stories that effectively rendered Marconi inconsequential to the further development of radio. The widespread installation of radios in automobiles in the 1950s, Matthew Killmeier argues, paralleled the development of television and ubiquitous middle-class suburbia in America. Heather Hundley analyzes depictions of male and female promiscuity as presented in the sitcom Cheers at a time concurrent with media coverage of the AIDS crisis. Fritz Messere examines the Federal Radio Act of 1927 and the clash of competing ideas about what role radio should play in American life. Chad Dell recounts the high-brow programming strategy NBC adopted in 1945 to distinguish itself from other networks. And George Plasketes studies the critical reactions to Cop Rock, an ill-fated combination of police drama and musical, as an example of society's resistance to genre-mixing or departures from formulaic programming. J. Emmett Winn is Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. Susan L. Brinson is Professor of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University and author of The Red Scare, Politics, and the Federal Communications Commission.
