Books with author Garrett Gunn

Garet Garrett's fiction deals with the social impact of economic transformations. In The Driver, he deals with railroads, while Satan's Bushel examines agriculture. The Cinder Buggy, his second in the trilogy, is the longest of the three and his true epoch novel and unforgettable masterpiece. With a great story, and tremendous literary passion, it chronicles the transformation of America from the age of iron to the age of steel.It covers the period between 1820 and 1870 and its dramatic march of technology. The plot concerns an ongoing war between two industrialists, one the hero who is beaten in the first generation and the other who is malevolent but wins the first round in the competitive drive. The struggle continues through the second generation, which leads to a titanic battle over whether steel or iron will triumph and why.Wrought iron is what made New Damascus tick and the two men who made it happen were named Aaron Breakspeare and Enoch Gib. Aaron is beloved but not a great businessmen. He had dreamed of the steel age but failed to make it happen. Enoch is a good businessman but dour and widely loathed for his miserliness and his treatment of others. A feud over a banker's daughter leads to the initial dissolution of the partnership, and the son of the resulting union, John Breakspeare, returns to New Damascus to enter the iron business.This leads to a fascinating repeat of events that causes another dissolution, this one more bitter and shocking than the last. The feud continues over iron and then over steel until steel wins the victory after many fits and starts. In the course of the story, the reader discovers how it is that technology has such a dramatic effect on society, and how risk and entrepreneurship are at the very heart of it all.Whereas this genre of fiction usually deals with real war, Garrett employs every literary device to make commerce itself the setting for great acts of courage, heroism, sacrifice, and tragedy. And as with his other books, the central mover of events here is the price system. It is the signal for and cause of the most notable changes in the plot. The reader discovers economics in a way that might otherwise not be possible, and it is hard to imagine that anyone could come away with anything but love of the whole subject of enterprise.Garrett does not portray the market as some idealized utopia. We have here the full range of human emotion and motivation at work: arrogance, pride, malice, love, compassion, jealousy, rage, and everything else. What is striking is that all these emotions play themselves out in a setting that is ultimately peaceful. No one can fully control how prices change, and it is these changes that act to reward virtues and punish vices.We also have here a realistic portrayal of the truth about innovation. It is not enough to come up with a good idea. That idea must be embodied in real production that takes place in a cost-reducing way, and then marketed in the service of society. The unity of technology, accounting, and marketing must all come together to make possible such things as technological revolutions.There has never been, before or since, economic fiction that can compare with the high quality standards set by Garrett in these smashing novels. The Cinder Buggy could easily be considered the best of his work in this area. It is a wonderful novel for anyone who loves, or wants to more deeply understand, American history, economic theory, and the place of technology in the molding of society. To search for Mises Institute titles, enter a keyword and "LvMI" (short for Ludwig von Mises Institute); e.g., "Depression LvMI"

Fifteen-year-old Anika had no idea she’s descended from royalty and comes from an enchanted land in another realm. The only magic in her life is her grand magician father, William, whose clever performances always draw admiring crowds. Anika starts practicing a few tricks of her own—but disappearing was never on her list. When she’s confronted by two strange men searching for a pocket watch connected to Cora, her deceased mother, Anika is stuffed into a wooden magician’s box and transported to the land of Valgard. There, she meets Eris, one of the kingdom’s four sibling rulers—who also happens to be Anika’s aunt. Eris needs help reuniting the kingdom, requiring the stones of the Gods, given to each sibling after the king’s death, to do so. One of the stones belongs to Eris’s illusionist brother, Merrick. Anika is shocked to discover that Merrick is the reason her father fled Valgard years before—and that he’s holding her mother captive. Eager to help, Anika agrees to steal his stone to free her mother. But something about Eris’s elaborate tale doesn’t add up, causing Anika to question who the real threat is—and if perhaps she is aiding the wrong side.

Excerpt from The Cinder Buggy: A Fable in Iron, and SteelThe town has nothing to sell except the finest wrought iron in the world. As the quality of this iron is historic and the form of it a standard muck bar for use in further manufacture you order it from afar at a price based on what is current in Pittsburgh.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

WHEN the reviewers must review a popular book about oil, or the history of the automobile, or the development of water power, they have a way of saying that they found it more interesting than fiction. There is a new novel called The Cinder Buggy, by Mr. Garet Garrett, which gives particular point to this way of saying. The Cinder Buggy is an epic of steel, to borrow another convention of the reviewers; together with a disclosure of various fictional human minds there runs the true story of the development of steel in this country, and it is the latter is the absorbing, exciting part of Mr. Garrett’s book; indeed, it is perhaps not too enthusiastic to say that there is not anywhere else in literature an account of the Pittsburg Era so compelling, so dramatic as is here. Reading, we had the feeling that the author held an immense grip on the history of steel, knew it as he knows the inside of his pocket; the steel sections of this novel were so good that they quite overwhelmed the story sections; we found ourselves bending back the pages which continued the plot to see how far it was until there would be more description of ore or pig iron or wrought iron or steel, just as in the opposite way in other novels we have sometimes turned the long pages describing “scenery” to see when the story would begin again. And as we finished The Cinder Buggy we asked ourselves whether it was not inevitable that any book, no matter by however able a writer, which aimed to reveal human minds and emotions and to tell the story of a thing at the same time, as this novel does, would end by doing the latter and not the former. In a novel, as in life itself, “the thing runs wild, and doth the “man unking.” In the novel, Le Maitre de Forges, Georges Ohnet set forth characters which, like Mr. Garrett’s characters, cannot bend or be bent, and so must break or be broken. But Ohnet decided to make his principal character into an iron-master after he had conceived him as a man. It is our guess that Mr. Garet Garrett conceived his men and women as part of the history of steel first and made them flesh and blood.

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Garet Garrett's fiction deals with the social impact of economic transformations. In The Driver, he deals with railroads, while Satan's Bushel examines agricultural. The Cinder Buggy, his second in the trilogy, is the longest of the three and his true epoch novel and unforgettable masterpiece. With a great story, and tremendous literary passion, it chronicles the transformation of America from the age of iron to the age of steel. It covers the period between 1820 and 1870 and its dramatic technology march. The plot concerns an ongoing war between two industrialists, one the hero who is beaten in the first generation and the other who is malevolent but initially wins a first round in the competitive drive. The struggle continues through the second generation, which leads to a titanic battle over whether steel or iron would triumph and why. Garrett does not portray the market as some idealized utopia. We have here the full range of human emotion and motivation at work: arrogance, pride, malice, love, compassion, jealousy, rage, and everything else. What is striking is that all these emotions play themselves out in a setting that is ultimately peaceful. No one can fully control price movements, and it is these that act to reward virtues and punish vices. There has never been, before or since, economic fiction that can compare with this super high quality standards set by Garrett in these smashing novels. The Cinder Buggy could easily be considered the best of his work in this area. It is a wonderful novel for anyone who loves, or wants to more deeply understand, American history, economic theory, and the place of technology in the molding of society. 365 page paperback 2007