Excerpt from Enduring Courage by John F. Ross, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The accident sent Eddie to the Livingston loft bed for some days. His mother nursed him, her energetic care fueled by guilt over her son’s early entrance into a man’s workplace. Had the lumber slid into him at a slightly different angle, it could easily have snapped his leg bones, crippling him for life. In that hard world where little care was taken for worker safety, accidents were a man’s problem, not the company’s.

Eddie dwelt little on much beyond the most recent past. His ride in the Model C almost possessed him. In his waking dreams, the thrill of speed, freedom, and powerful motion claimed his imagination as nothing had before—and sent him down the road over and over again.

His short career had made him passably handy at lathing, stonecutting, cobbling, and glassmaking, all practical skills employed toward tangible, traditional uses, which nevertheless offered little chance for imaginative reinterpretation. In this boy’s prescient eyes, the Model C was a mere charcoal sketch of what was to come. On first impression, few people recognize an object’s transcendent possibilities—to most, for instance, the automobile was simply a horseless carriage. Eddie looked beyond its shiny exterior and saw the promise of a new frontier, one that could be continually recast and made ever more formidably useful. Reflecting in old age on a life of unceasing initiative and enterprise, Eddie would muse justly that “I was a dynamic part of progress and life.”

By the turn of the century, the American geographical frontier was no more. Intrepid explorers would soon reach both poles; others had long since rounded both capes by sail and pushed overland into the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Australia and across the ranges of South America. Deep in its genetic makeup, the restless nature of Americans yearned for new challenges, new horizons, which they would find in the obsession with going ever faster and higher. If speed was America’s new religion, then the car was its mobile temple. Eddie would soon become one of its most powerful prophets.

Excerpted from Enduring Courage by John F Ross. Copyright © 2014 by John F Ross. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.