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Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City Hardcover – September 28, 2001
- Print length286 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherIvan R. Dee
- Publication dateSeptember 28, 2001
- Dimensions6.26 x 1.23 x 9.44 inches
- ISBN-101566633850
- ISBN-13978-1566633857
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
Thoroughly intelligent. (Daniel Akst The Wall Street Journal )
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Ivan R. Dee; First Edition (September 28, 2001)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 286 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1566633850
- ISBN-13 : 978-1566633857
- Item Weight : 1.61 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.26 x 1.23 x 9.44 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,209,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,033 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- #4,450 in International Business & Investing
- #82,165 in United States History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jason Goodwin is a novelist, traveller and historian, and also writes the 'Spectator' column for Country Life. He has written about the Far East and about walking 2000 miles to Istanbul. Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, was described by Jan Morris as 'a high-octane work of art'. Time Out called it 'perhaps the most readable history ever written on anything'.
His Istanbul-based series of historical thrillers began with The Janissary Tree, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, while Yashim #3 The Bellini Card was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of the 100 best crime novels since 1945. Translated into over 40 languages, the five-novel series now has its own illustrated cookbook, YASHIM COOKS ISTANBUL: Culinary Adventures in the Ottoman Kitchen.
Jason is a member of the Guild of Food Writers and sits on the committee of Headread, the annual Estonian literary festival.
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My great grandfather is well covered in the book, William DELAVAN (not Delaney as in the book) Baldwin. I guess what makes me more sensitive about it is the my middle name (and one of my grandsons too) is, you guessed it, Delavan.
I still recommend buying the book.
It is a book written for people who are interested in the growth of the world's greatest cities and a company that was instrumental for that growth.
The biggest surprise was the book's readability. Goodwin helped me understand the personalities and motivations of the people who brought Otis to where it is today. He painted pictures of the situations surrounding the events which helped me understand the logic behind Otis' progress. I felt he dealt honestly with United Technologies' takeover of Otis in 1976 (which I experienced) and brought the influences of Otis' global operations into perspective.
It is an eye opener for internal Otis associates, and an educational experience for non-Otis readers who want to learn how a company can start from nothing and influence the way we all live. It is a book about machines, business, cities, and time. I highly recommend it.
BUT, what I found hugely missing from the book was a systematic, engineering-oriented account of elevator technologies, in the form of line drawings, photographs or diagrams. The 48 pp of B&W material alluded to in the reviews cover mostly on-site head shots, more appropriate for an in-house corporate publication.
The text makes numerous references to particular elevator technologies, favoring them with a cursory verbal description, but no real sense of what an installation looked like. The only verbal description that does justice to any conceptual design is Goodwin's description of Otis' early "stunt" elevator, where a rope pulled upward on a flat, flexible steel bar mounted flat on the cage roof, and wider than the cage, so that when pulled, the bar bent upward in the middle and retracted from the side rails, allowing the car free travel, but when the rope was cut, the steel bar flattened out and its projecting ends stuck in the side rails to arrest the fall.
So, if you want to learn something about the mechanics of elevators, look elsewhere; perhaps in a classic compendium of old Scientific American issues and articles from the 19th century entitled, "Free Enterprise Forever." In short, the book is competently researched and written, but not very interesting. A better bet is The Mechanical Turk, by Tom Standage, an intriguing, ilustrated account of a seemingly mechanical chess-playing wizard.