Make Way for the Lincvolt!

Will Neil Young be the next Elon Musk with his Lincvolt? To read his 2011 biography, Young has a very wide range of interests that keep him going between albums. One of them is his dream of a big car that requires no fossil fuel, so he and a small group of engineers came up with the Lincvolt, transforming a vintage Lincoln Continental that had many fond memories for Young into a hybrid automobile.

He has taken the classic car on the road, recently visiting Stephen Colbert in New York, where he plugged his innovative car, which is fitted with a pono stereo system that plays much higher quality digital music than the conventional MP3's. This kind of retro engineering is really cool and fits well into the American imagination. Oh, and he did a new song with Stephen, which one hopes will come out on Pono early next year.

What Neil is doing is nothing new, but it helps to have a Rock-n-roll icon pushing these CO2-friendly conversions, as it will draw more attention to this new hobby that is sweeping the country. Many have adapted vintage cars into hybrid and electric automobiles. Electric conversion kits run about $11,500 for vintage VW automobiles.

Young gets into some of the history behind ethanol-fueled and electric cars in Waging Heavy Peace, noting that Henry Ford was keen on the idea, but that the fledgling oil industry offered an affordable fuel at the time that was hard to beat. So long corn and hemp fuels, and hello gasoline. Young opts for biomass as his fuel source, which provides a good alternative to ethanol that relies almost exclusively on corn.

The idea of a hybrid car is that the fuel combustion engine charges the battery pack on the road so you don't have to stop for recharging. Elon Musk has dealt with this issue by exchanging battery packs at selected stations around the country, which takes as little time as filling up your tank. I don't think Elon has anything to worry about in the Lincvolt cracking into his market, but it will make for a great show piece on the road.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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