The Man Who Stopped Time

"The photography of Eadweard Muybridge is immediately familiar to us. Less familiar is the dramatic personal story of this seminal and wonderfully eccentric Victorian pioneer." "In his work, we see some of the first icons of the modern visual age. Men, women, boxers, wrestlers, racehorses, elephants, and camels frozen in time, captured in the act of moving, fighting, galloping, living. Scarcely a day goes by without their use somewhere in today's media. And if most of us have seen Muybridge's distinctive stop-motion photographs, all of us have seen the fruit of his extraordinary technological innovation: today's cinema and television." "But it is his personal life that possesses all the ingredients of a classic nonfiction best-seller: a passionately driven man struggling against the odds; dire treachery and shocking betrayal; a cast of larger-than-life characters set against a backdrop of San Francisco and the Far West in its most turbulent and dangerous era; a profusion of scientific and artistic advances and discoveries, one hotly following another; the nervous intensity of two spectacular courtroom dramas (one pitting Muybridge against the richest man in the land and staring ruin in the face, the other leaving him fighting for his life). And for the opening act, a foul murder on a dark and stormy night."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.