"None of the well-dressed crowd that gathered on the Hudson River side of Lower Manhattan on the hot afternoon of August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton's new steamboat, the North River, the boat that is frequently - and wrongly - remembered as the Clermont. But, as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in this biography of Fulton, the North River's successful four-day round-trip to...