Amazon.com Review
"Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors." --Robert Louis Stevenson
The 14 lighthouses dotting the Scottish coast were all built by the same family that produced
Robert Louis Stevenson, Scotland's most famous novelist. Surprised?
Bella Bathurst throws a powerful, revolving light into the darkness of this historical tradition. Robert Louis was a sickly fellow, and--unlike the rest of his strong-willed, determined family--certainly not up to the astonishing rigors of lighthouse building, which is vividly described here. Constructing these towering structures in the most inhospitable places imaginable (such as the aptly named Cape Wrath), using only 19th-century technology, is an achievement that beggars belief. One thinks of the pyramid building of ancient Egypt. At the Skerryvore lighthouse, the ground rocks were prepared by hand (even though the "gneiss could blunt a pick in three blows") in waves and winds "strong enough to lift a man bodily off the rock" and that "it took 120 hours to dress a single stone for the outside of the tower, and 320 hours to dress one of the central stones. In total 5000 tons of stone were quarried and shipped"--and all by hand. It is mind-boggling stuff: you'll look at lighthouses with a new respect.
--Adam Roberts, Amazon.co.uk
From Publishers Weekly
A real-life Shipping News, Bathurst's flamboyant and elegantly written saga is bursting with life, laced with romantic dreams, oversized ambitions, murder, piracy, nepotism, smoldering feuds, scientific ingenuity and the lonely heroism of men battling the elements. Bathurst tells how four generations of Robert Louis Stevenson's family designed and built the 97 manned lighthouses that speckle the Scottish coast. A reluctant engineer turned writer, RLS transmuted his lighthouse-building expeditions around Scotland's northern coast into Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but he rebelled against his quarrelsome father, Thomas, who tried to corral him into the family business. The rest is literary history. Much less well-known is the Lighthouse Stevensons' extraordinary family history: they built harbors, canals, railways and street lighting systems, and contributed numerous inventions to optics, engineering and architecture. Yet, out of stubborn altruistic pride, no family member ever took out a patent on any of their inventions. Even readers with no special interest in the sea or Scotland will be swept up in Bathurst's narrative, intriguingly illustrated with photographs, prints and drawings. Sir Walter Scott, Michael Faraday and Daniel Defoe stalk through these pages, and Bathurst unveils the Lighthouse Stevensons' battles, accomplishments, frustrations and personal tragedies against a backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment, the advent of British naval supremacy, the Crimean War, the destruction of Highland society and the uneasy marriage of Scotland and England. She also devotes a marvelous, wistful chapter to the lost art of lighthouse-keepingAall of Britain's lighthouses are now automated, computers having replaced keepers. Her exuberant family drama is an enchantment. Author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
