The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson

In Alexander McCall Smith's A Promise Of Ankles, Bertie is reading The Lighthouse Stevensons and seems to enjoy it in a primary-school kind of way. So I thought I might enjoy it in a Nonna kind of way, and I did! It's quite fascinating (once you memorize the convenient family tree and read enough to understand some of the more unusual links), involving the history of technology, lighthouses, and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. There is drama and adventure and human interest. I suspect that I got a lot more out of it than Bertie did.

This is as much a hymn to Scottish lighthouses as a biography of the family who built them. As the author acknowledges in the introduction, this can't be a complete biography of the Stevenson family, that would simply be too long. Instead it concentrates on those members who built the lighthouses and looks at the lighthouses they built. The complicating factor is that one of their number wasn't an engineer, he was Robert Louis Stevenson and he's famous for an entirely different sphere of work. He wrote a book about his family, and that is referenced, several times.
Individually the Stevensons are a mixed lot, some are nicer than others, some are more suited to being an engineer of this kind than others, but they all manage to be show more interesting, and the tales of the lighthouses they built (and which still stand) are on a common theme, but all present with different challenges.
The book does tail off, with the next generation being introduced, but they are not followed beyond their youth. I didn't realise that (at the time of writing) lighthouses were still being built, with three being added in recent years for the oil tankers that ply the North sea.
This manages to be interesting and informative about quite a specialist subject. It sets their achievements against the technical and social background of the task at hand and describes how the issues were overcome. It is limited in scope to just those of the family with a part in the family business, but it acknowledges that at the start - a complete biography of 4 generations of a family would be extensive. This is well worth reading. show less

Amazing story of perseverance against the odds in constructing lighthouses in wild and inhospitable locations. The accounts of men quarrying into solid rock, having to stop for each tide, and sometimes only being able to work a few days because of the weather, is a real eye-opener into the working conditions of the time. Technology also plays a part, with the initial development of reflectors, and then lenses, alongside developments in the construction of the towers themselves. If we think we live hectic lives today, read about the punishing schedules of the Stevenson family, and how much they fitted into a year...!

Average

The subject itself is interesting, such as how did the lighthouses around the coast of Scotland get built? The biography of the family that did it, including Robert Louis Stevenson is also of interest. The historical time period itself from the late 1700’s to the late 1800’s is also inherently interesting. A good non-fiction writer can grip you with a narrative of the subject but sadly Bathurst failed to grip me. Oh there’s lots to like in here, a discussion of lighthouse technology, architecture, the reasons for lighthouses, the struggle to build them in remote places but it just wasn’t brought alive enough for me. For a subject so soaked in the ocean waves she managed to make it a little dry.

Overall – Fascinating show more subject slightly too dry book for my tastes show less

Fascinating study into both the history of lighthouse building (primarily in Scotland) and into the family that built the lighthouses and produced Robert Louis Stevenson.

Extremely well written and a fascinating history.

An interesting account of various generations of the Stevenson family and the lighthouses that they built around the Scottish coast in the 1800s. I found the book a bit dry, but I'm not a huge fan of non-fiction.