An illustrated history of American innovators -- some well known, some unknown, and all fascinating -- by the author of the bestselling The American Century. In his second large-format book about U.S. history, Evans extolls American moxie, that seemingly native mixture of initiative and luck that produced the Colt revolver, the FM radio, the Kodak camera, Mickey Mouse, and eBay. As a historian, Evans is less concerned with the inventive spark itself than with how it finds capital and markets. This approach allows fresh insights into familiar stories; we know that the Wright brothers flew, but not, perhaps, how they flirted with the French before selling their machine to the U.S. government. Evans favors "democratizers" who generated affordable mass culture; Henry Ford is his paragon. In the current era, he focusses on the ferment of Silicon Valley, as embodied by such innovators as Larry Page, the Google co-founder, who marvels that more people don't work in technology, because "that's the easiest way to change the world." Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker If you wear a bra, listen to a radio, have a bank account, or use any of 67 other technologies or business practices that Evans writes about, know that they were commercialized by "innovators," as the author dubs their creators. Biography provides the backbone of Evans' profiles and is well supported by his grasp of the business and social environments operated in by these historical entrepreneurs, who span from steamboat pioneers John Fitch and Robert Fulton to MRI inventor Raymond Damadian, who exemplifies the type Evans extols here. Damadian did not discover nuclear magnetic resonance, but he built and marketed a machine that in some way made life longer or more comfortable for the masses. Ida Rosenthal did it by getting women out of corsets and into her Maidenform bras; Malcolm McLean did it by building SeaLand, the container-shipping company that revolutionized world trade. Eclectic in its range of subjects, this work's wealth of photographs will enhance its popular appeal, as will its incarnation on PBS in November 2004. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Harold Evans is a British-born journalist and writer who was editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. A graduate of Durham University, he has written a number of bestselling histories. He followed the late Alistair Cooke in commentaries on America for the BBC. An American citizen since 1993, he has held positions as editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly Press , founding editor of the prize-winning Condé Nast Traveler ; editorial director of the Atlantic and US News and the New York Daily News ; and president and publisher of Random House. He holds the British Press Awards' Gold Award for Lifetime Achievement of Journalists. In 2001 British journalists voted him the all-time greatest British newspaper editor, and in 2004 he was knighted. Since 2011, he has been editor-at-large for Reuters .