Description
A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book of the Year
Nearly 140 years ago, in frontier California, photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured time with his camera and played it back on a flickering screen, inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures. Yet the visionary inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial became a national sensation. Despite Muybridge’s crime, the artist’s patron, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once—and together these two unlikely men launched the age of visual media. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West.
About the Author
Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1958, grew up in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. He finished high school in New Orleans and attended Brown University, graduating in 1982 with a B.A. in Semiotics.He received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1984, and afterwards moved to New York City, where he worked as a freelance art critic, writing about film, art, architecture, and books for several magazines. For several years, he wrote for The Village Voice, a weekly with a circulation of 450,000.In 1993, he began to research his family legacy as slave owners in South Carolina, an investigation that resulted in a half-hour National Public Radio documentary, "The Other History," which was awarded, in 1994, Best Radio Feature by the Society of Professional Journalists. He looked deeper into his family's story, documented in several archives, and, after three years, published his first book, Slaves in the Family, about his family's plantations and his search for black Americans whose ancestors the writer's family had once enslaved. Slaves in the Family was a New York Times bestseller and won the National Book Award for nonfiction.Edward Ball's other books comprise biography, history, and memoir. He has taught at Yale University, and he lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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