by Kirkpatrick Sale

None of the spectators who gathered on the Hudson River shore on August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton's new steamboat. But as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in this remarkable biography, Fulton's 'large, noisy, showy, fast, brash, exciting, powerful, and audacious' machine would -- for better or worse -- irrevocably transform nineteenth-century America.

Set against a brilliant portrait of a dynamic period in history, 'The Fire of