From Publishers Weekly
In the 1870s, at a racetrack built by railroad baron Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge invented high-speed photography. With his camera, he cut time into fractions of a second and laid it out in slices. Never before had human eyes seen a trotting horse distinctly, and the photographs astounded horsemen and artists, especially when Muybridge set the film in motion and the horse reeled fluidly across the screen. Today it is difficult to understand the pictures' impact, but 2001 NBCC finalist Solnit (As Eve Said to the Serpent) vividly recreates the wonder that greeted those primitive movies. Although she points her lens at Muybridge, her true subject is the perceptual revolution of the 19th century when the railroad, the telegraph and the camera transformed the experience of space and time. English-born Muybridge launched his career in 1867 with scenes of Yosemite and San Francisco. He soon began the experiments with "instantaneous" photography that led to the famous motion studies. Except for its most dramatic moments-the murder of his wife's lover, a suit against Stanford-the photographer's life remains obscure. Insistent on writing a biography nonetheless, Solnit pads the book with an account of workers' strikes, an aside on Victorian geology and other irrelevant details. Left to speculate about Muybridge's inspirations, she attributes much to a head injury resulting from a stagecoach accident. Her claims about Stanford and Muybridge as the progenitors of Silicon Valley and Hollywood are equally unsubstantiated. If the book fails as biography, however, it succeeds as a critical essay on Muybridge's art and a reflection on the meaning of space and time. B&w photos. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Cultural historian Solnit, an original and penetrating thinker with a gift for inventive metaphors and syntactical grace whose previous books include Wanderlust (2000), brings her fascination with the American West, photography, and technology's impact on the environment and culture to the story of the man who made motion pictures possible, photographer Eadweard Muybridge. An Englishman turned California bookseller, superb landscape photographer, inventor, murderer (he killed his wife's lover), and pioneer in stop-action photography and the study of animals, including humans, in motion, Muybridge is fascinating and significant, as is his turbulent milieu. Solnit recounts Muybridge's strange life and immensely influential work within the context of the tragic war against Native Americans, and ties his achievements to the world-changing repercussions of photography and the railroads in particular, and industrialization in general. Her exhilarating argument leads her to declare that California, home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is the true capital of modernism, and to claim that we haven't even begun to come to terms with its legacy: our estrangement from nature and utter immersion in the mesmerizing "river of shadows," the endless stream of images generated via film, video, and computer. Masterly and creative, Solnit's far-roaming synthesis is as unsettling as it is compelling. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ANNOTATION

Winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The world as we know it today began in California in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and a man named Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit's book, which weaves together biography, history, and insights into art, technology, landscape, and photography to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity." During a period of feverish creativity that commenced in 1872, Eadweard Muybridge succeeded for the first time in capturing high-speed motion photographically - the crucial breakthrough that made movies possible. He also continued his series of photographs of the monumental landscape of the American West; served as official photographer of the Modoc War, California's most dramatic Native American conflict; and, in a blaze of publicity, stood trial for the murder of his wife's lover.

SYNOPSIS

Writer Rebecca Solnit offers an elegantly written, insightful discussion of the 19th-century technological, artistic, and social transformation of time and space, told through the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), whose fine photographs of the American West still astonish, and whose mastery for the first time of high-speed motion photography made movies possible. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

That's about all there is to the story, and lucky for us: because if Muybridge had had anything like an eventful life, Rebecca Solnit might have had to write something like a standard biography. Instead, we have this vastly more valuable book, River of Shadows, a brilliant essay on Muybridge and all he begat. It is, all at once and in no particular order, a brief summation of a man's life, a meditation on time, image and motion, a history of the American West as a fount of technological innovation and perceptual change, and a beautiful piece of prose. — Jim Lewis

The Los Angeles Times

Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West is a perfect example of a subject waiting ￯﾿ﾽ in this case for almost a century and a half ￯﾿ﾽ for the appropriate writer to come along to unlock its concealed meaning and unexpected relevance. The subject is Eadweard Muybridge the photographer and Eadweard Muybridge the phenomenon, and together they have brought out in Solnit a book that is so spirited and free-ranging, so Western in its unfettered questing curiosity, that its genre is not easy to define. — Michael Frank

The Village Voice

Shadows could be a biography, but interspersed between the Muybridge sections is an argument about how capital transformed not only the American West, but the entire fabric of the modern world, from a place where place mattered to an environment without space or time. It is the measure of Solnit's graceful, thoughtful book that she finds in cinema a "breach in the wall between the past and the present" where machines and desires are reconciled.

Publishers Weekly

In the 1870s, at a racetrack built by railroad baron Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge invented high-speed photography. With his camera, he cut time into fractions of a second and laid it out in slices. Never before had human eyes seen a trotting horse distinctly, and the photographs astounded horsemen and artists, especially when Muybridge set the film in motion and the horse reeled fluidly across the screen. Today it is difficult to understand the pictures' impact, but 2001 NBCC finalist Solnit (As Eve Said to the Serpent) vividly recreates the wonder that greeted those primitive movies. Although she points her lens at Muybridge, her true subject is the perceptual revolution of the 19th century when the railroad, the telegraph and the camera transformed the experience of space and time. English-born Muybridge launched his career in 1867 with scenes of Yosemite and San Francisco. He soon began the experiments with "instantaneous" photography that led to the famous motion studies. Except for its most dramatic moments-the murder of his wife's lover, a suit against Stanford-the photographer's life remains obscure. Insistent on writing a biography nonetheless, Solnit pads the book with an account of workers' strikes, an aside on Victorian geology and other irrelevant details. Left to speculate about Muybridge's inspirations, she attributes much to a head injury resulting from a stagecoach accident. Her claims about Stanford and Muybridge as the progenitors of Silicon Valley and Hollywood are equally unsubstantiated. If the book fails as biography, however, it succeeds as a critical essay on Muybridge's art and a reflection on the meaning of space and time. B&w photos. (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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