Tom Paine's Iron Bridge

Gray's brief audiobook shows Thomas Paine's part in two revolutions, the American and the French, but focuses on his attempt to build iron bridges of his own innovative design, especially one across the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. Tom Perkins gives a solid reading, well paced and adept at clearly rendering the sense of the text through his inflections and shaping of sentences. He gives quotations more volume and force than other text, which makes the people quoted seem overwrought, and at times his breathing is distractingly audible. Perkins elongates some vowel sounds that oddly interrupt this standard American accent. Still, his reading is basically intelligent and sturdy, conveying the text effectively. W.M. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

January 4, 2016
Many Americans think of Tom Paine as a great champion of independence from Britain, and as a skilled firebrand. Gray (Colonial America: A History in Documents), professor of history at Florida State University, brings the radical pamphleteer alive as an architect of iron bridges. He makes a good case that Paine’s hopes for the infant United States went beyond its political independence. Wanting also to help unite the country, Paine applied his amateur design skills to the idea of physically knitting together the American territory. Understanding that the nation’s many rivers were obstacles to commerce as well as avenues of transportation, he saw the need to bridge them. Unfortunately, hard luck, ideological battles, difficulties with public authorities (in the U.S., Britain, and France), and an inveterate penury thwarted Paine’s schemes. But as he’d proved in his political writings, his visions were sound even if his execution of them was not. Others in the U.S. and elsewhere eventually erected iron bridges, some at least modestly influenced by his designs and models. Gray’s prose is lively; the solid tale he tells may be of no major significance to a broader historical understanding, but it adds to the body of knowledge about a passionate man and the tumultuous era in which he lived. Illus.