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The Air Loom Gang (Paperback)

by Mike Jay (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 346 pages
  • Publisher: Bantam Books; New edition edition (1 Jun 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0553814850
  • ISBN-13: 978-0553814859
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.6 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 543,354 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

" ... beautifully written, with all the drama, the rich characterization, the subtlety, of a fine novel."
-- Oliver Sacks
" Mike Jay has taken a magnifying glass to the archives and detected what amounts to a disgraceful miscarriage of justice."
-- "Daily Mail"


Product Description

"The Air Loom Gang" recounts the remarkable true story of Matthews: a peace activist caught up in the Napoleonic wars between England and France who becomes convinced of an elaborate conspiracy aimed at the very heart of power.
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Cabbage and the origins of alien abduction fantasy, 28 Jun 2003
This review is from: The Air Loom Gang (Hardcover)
Start reading page one of the Air Loom Gang and you're in trouble.

The author has a very crafty way of taking a story that - to me at least - was quite obscure, and getting you really stuck into it. It's fun, engaging, and then he explains why it's far more important than one might realise.

Around the central figure of one man, James Tilly Matthews, he develops fascinating themes: spying in the French Revolution, the bureaucratic nightmare of the Terror, paranoia and insanity. Heuses haunting settings - Bedlam, the House of Commons, revolutionary France.

This is fine and you're thinking - hooray, what a great book, really well written, what a hilarious scheme to bust out of jail by proposing an ingenious master plan for new ways to grow cabbages for the revolution. Are our present leaders any more sane?

But then Mike Jay presses the warp drive and proves the several ways in which James Tilly Mathews' story is pivotal - to the emergence of politics of left and right in European history, to the transition of paranoid fear from demons to mind-control machines and emergence of phenomena like alien abduction experiences, the battle between medicine and religion for control of the vulnerable mentally ill. He shows the world in a grain of sand.

How many writers can take something we've never heard of, make it familiar and clear to understand, then seduce us down the path of understanding until we realise its unversal importance.

Hooray for Jay, I say.

William Heath

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Evokes the past like a treasured heirloom , 22 Jan 2009
By possiblejersey (Wales) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)      
This review is from: The Air Loom Gang (Hardcover)
What a charming book! I love these historical biographies of little-known characters and their quirky stories, and this is nothing if not quirky.

I can honestly say that I had never heard of James Tilly Matthews before, and Mike Jay has done a fantastic job of bringing his story to popular attention. It seems to be a particularly sad miscarriage of justice. These days Mr Matthews would probably have just been an out-patient who was prescribed anti-psychotic medication. He was deluded, but not dangerously so.

I particularly liked the little sojourn into the French Revolution, too, which was explained, like everything else, very simply and straightforwardly. Jay has a particular talent in that respect: he takes the trouble to state the obvious without sounding patronising, whereas many authors would presume the reader had made a particular mental leap.

What's all the more remarkable is that Jay makes the reader care so much about a man who we don't even have a likeness of! There isn't so much as a rough sketch of the man, never mind a formal portrait. Which is a shame. I would have so much liked to have known what he looked like. In a similar vein, we only first encounter him as a tea merchant with a young family, so his early life is tantalisingly just out of reach.

But as I often think with these books, where the extant documentary evidence of a life is only patchy and largely incomplete, it's easy to become sentimental about the subject, whereas subjects of contemporary biographies are too human and so less likeable. But overall I think Jay didn't fall into the trap that Matthews's gentle character could have led us: to put him on a pedestal.

There are also a generous number of illustrations, which I am always pleased to discover. I think it's nice to pause when I reach one to mull over what I have just read.

I think I would give this book four-and-a-half stars.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Conspiracy Theories are not that new, 26 Jan 2008
This is an excellent book. Well researched. Fast paced and thoroughly engaging. Showing how one man's madness developed and then was used by the society of the time
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Cabbage and the origin of alien abduction fantasies
Start reading page one of the Air Loom Gang and you're in trouble.

The author has a very crafty way of taking a story that - to me at least - was quite obscure, and getting you... Read more

Published on 28 Jun 2003 by williamheath

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