The Technologists, Matthew Pearl
The Technologists, Matthew Pearl
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The Technologists

Author: Matthew Pearl

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Unabridged: 18 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/21/2012


Synopsis

The first class at M.I.T. The last hope for a city in peril.
 
The acclaimed author of The Dante Club reinvigorates the historical thriller. Matthew Pearl’s spellbinding new novel transports readers to tumultuous nineteenth-century Boston, where the word “technology” represents a bold and frightening new concept. The fight for the future will hinge on . . .
 
THE TECHNOLOGISTS
 
Boston, 1868. The Civil War may be over but a new war has begun, one between the past and the present, tradition and technology. On a former marshy wasteland, the daring Massachusetts Institute of Technology is rising, its mission to harness science for the benefit of all and to open the doors of opportunity to everyone of merit. But in Boston Harbor a fiery cataclysm throws commerce into chaos, as ships’ instruments spin inexplicably out of control. Soon after, another mysterious catastrophe devastates the heart of the city. Is it sabotage by scientific means or Nature revolting against man’s attempt to control it?
 
The shocking disasters cast a pall over M.I.T. and provoke assaults from all sides—rival Harvard, labor unions, and a sensationalistic press. With their first graduation and the very survival of their groundbreaking college now in doubt, a band of the Institute’s best and brightest students secretly come together to save innocent lives and track down the truth, armed with ingenuity and their unique scientific training.
 
Led by “charity scholar” Marcus Mansfield, a quiet Civil War veteran and one-time machinist struggling to find his footing in rarefied Boston society, the group is rounded out by irrepressible Robert Richards, the bluest of Beacon Hill bluebloods; Edwin Hoyt, class genius; and brilliant freshman Ellen Swallow, the Institute’s lone, ostracized female student. Working against their small secret society, from within and without, are the arrayed forces of a stratified culture determined to resist change at all costs and a dark mastermind bent on the utter destruction of the city.
 
Studded with suspense and soaked in the rich historical atmosphere for which its author is renowned, The Technologists is a dazzling journey into a dangerous world not so very far from our own, as the America we know today begins to shimmer into being.

About The Author

Matthew Pearl is the New York Times bestselling author of The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens, The Technologists, The Last Bookaneer, and The Dante Chamber, and the editor of the Modern Library editions of Dante’s Inferno (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and his nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and Slate.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mary

This book suffers from a marketing problem. The blurbs call it a thriller, but it's written like a straight historical fiction. Pearl does his damndest to end every chapter -- and sometimes every section! -- dangling off a ledge, but somehow the adrenaline just doesn't kick in. The lush writing styl......more

Goodreads review by Scott

First off, The Technologists is a long read, but that’s okay because it is a clever and addicting story. Pearl does his homework, and even though there are places you can tell he’s just including things you know he discovered in his research, it works because it helps build a believable, multilayere......more

Goodreads review by Jason

Matthew Pearl’s “The Technologists” is a historical mystery set in post-Civil War Boston. Pearl does a magnificent job of recreating a 19th century Boston that I can only compare to the New York City of Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist”. The book is sort of a CSI-Boston (1800’s)…a cast of strong character......more

Goodreads review by Jill

On a foggy night in 1868, all the ships in the Boston Harbor find that their compasses and other instruments inexplicably spin out of control, and because of the poor visibility, several ships collide. Shortly thereafter, the glass in the windows of the businesses in the central city begins to melt!......more


Quotes

Praise for The Technologists
 
The Technologists combines everything I love in a thriller: fascinating history, science, and a frightening mystery that demands to be solved. Matthew Pearl is one of my must-read authors. He never fails to intrigue and thrill!”—Tess Gerritsen, author of The Silent Girl

Fascinating, mesmerizing, and richly atmospheric, The Technologists is the best yet from a true master of the historical thriller. I loved this novel.”—Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of Buried Secrets and Vanished

“Pearl’s signature complex plotting, strewn with red herrings and populated with unlikely villains, leaves readers as shocked and intrigued as the Bostonians. . . . Pearl’s first three novels—The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens—were all New York Times bestsellers. His latest, another literary-historical thriller, seems certain to join the elite club.”—Booklist
 
Pearl again blends detective fiction with historical characters (such as pioneering feminist and MIT-trained scientist Ellen Swallow), and his cast reads like a who’s who of nineteenth-century Boston. . . . Great fun.”—Publishers Weekly