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Overview

A Bombardier Books Title

Bombardier Books has quickly found success by making its way into modern culture with numerous bestselling titles. Bombardier Books largely places its focus on conservative political nonfiction works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781917923255
Publisher:	Putman Publishing
Publication date:	11/06/2025
Format:	eBook

About the Author

A Bombardier Books Author

Table of Contents

Foreword by Maria Popova

1. Introduction: On Presumption

2. The “Amistad” Mutiny

3. New Haven Childhood

4. Science and the Imagination

5. The Education

6. Father and Son

7. The Civil War

8. The Years Abroad

9. Return to America

10. The First Papers

11. A Chair in Mathematical Physics

12. The Great Paper

13. “Mathematics Is a Language”

14. The Rosetta Stone of Science

15. The Shadow and the Factory

16. Three Masters: Melville, Whitman, Gibbs

17. The Imagination of America

18. The Double Democracy

19. Tendencies of History

20. The Long Discovery of Willard Gibbs

Acknowledgments

Five Definitions

Reading List

Sources of Quotations

Index

About the Author and Introducer

Editorial Reviews

The Burning Land is an elegantly written, heartrending evocation of a Maine family's suffering during the Civil War and its aftermath. The battle scenes are riveting, the characters convincingly and compellingly developed. As a Civil War historian, I highly recommend David O. Stewart's marvelous novel.

Peter Cozzens

An intimate, sweeping portrait of a country and couple divided, David O. Stewart’s The Burning Land does what all good historical fiction should do: gives us characters to root for and brings the past so vividly to life it feels like the present. I can’t wait to see how the rest of the trilogy unfolds.

Louis Bayard

In The Burning Land, David O. Stewart has vividly brought alive the landscapes and human spirit of Civil War era America from the hardscrabble coast of Maine, through the battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania, to the chaotic postwar scramble to survive in the burgeoning city of Chicago. To the generational drama of the tenacious Overstreet family, Mr. Stewart brings a historian's feel for the ways in which ordinary lives were shaped by extraordinary times, enriched by an unerring eye for authentic detail and page-turning prose.

Fergus Bordewich

David O. Stewart has written many books, but this may be his best: a gripping Civil War novel, set in coastal Maine and with the famous Twentieth Maine Regiment, followed by an exciting account of post-war Chicago. This is a book you won't want to miss.

Walter Stahr

Muriel Rukeyser[’s] five-hundred-page prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) [is] a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world.”

—Maria Popova, From the Foreword

“Willard Gibbs is, in my opinion, one of the most original and important creative minds in the field of science America has produced.”

—Albert Einstein

“Willard Gibbs [was] one of the giants of science. Rukeyser’s excellent biography of [this] neglected figure relates him culturally to his time. [Gibbs] made himself the peer of Newton and Einstein. Yet Yale was hardly aware of his existence . . . It has remained for Muriel Rukeyser, a distinguished poet, to bring Gibbs back to life . . . Rukeyser has given us a pulsating picture of a living personality . . . She saw that for all his formal, scientific way of expressing himself, Gibbs was a poet who happened to use equations instead of verses to interpret a highly intricate and mysterious universe, an artist in mathematics who discovered unsuspected beauty in the design of nature . . . Her biography is bound to remain the standard for years to come.”

—Waldemar Kaempffert, The New York Times

“A Moby Dick of a book in intention and intimations, touching on ‘the sum of things’ . . . There are passages of rare poetic storytelling quality.”

—TIME

“If this man of mystery, this prophet without honor, had not lived when he did, the first World War might never have been fought . . . It has remained for a poet, Muriel Rukeyser, to put him into a biography which is also a study of the development of American culture since the beginning . . . Rukeyser makes Gibbs . . . a symbol of American greatness, a figure to put beside architects of the American spirit as varied as Walt Whitman and Lincoln . . . This is a biography which all Americans should read.”

—John Chamberlain, The New York Times

“[Gibbs’s] work gives a key to the understanding of some central tendencies in the intellectual and social history of the past hundred years . . . [Rukeyser] is almost unique among our poets in her intellectual inquisitiveness. Her Willard Gibbs witnesses to that desire to see all round the objects of her interest which led her to go to aviation school before writing Theory of Flight, and to make both a documentary and a first-hand investigation of certain phases of the social scene before writing U. S. 1.”

—Philip Blair Rice, The Kenyon Review

From the Publisher