Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Edison: Library Edition by Paul Israel, Raymond Todd ISBN: 0-7861-1794-X Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks Pub. Date: July, 2000 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 16 List Price(USD): $99.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (12 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Wonderful book
Comment: I did not know a great deal about Edison before reading this book and this served as a fascinating introduction. After visiting Edison's lab in West Orange, N.J. I became intrigued with him and wanted to learn more. Israel's book served as the perfect introduction to this complex and fascinating genius.
I emjoyed the fact that Israel divided the biography between Edison's professional scientific life and his complicated and sometimes bizarre private life, with strained relationships with his children and two marriages. Despite the fact Edison left much to be desired as a father, one almost feels sorry for him. Apparently his towering intellect made it difficult for him to connect emotionally with the more "plebian" sorts of people (which was everyone else on the planet). His sons struggled under the mighty shadow their father cast.
I highly recommend this book for anyone with a casual or serious insterest in the Wizard of Menlo Park.
Rating: 3
Summary: A detailed exploration of Edison's life and accomplishments
Comment: People can often be categorized into one of two bins: innovators and followers - a small number pave the way for the rest. I chose to read Israel's biography of Edison because I wanted to understand more about the 'Wizard of Menlo Park,' the innovator's innovator, Thomas A. Edison.
Israel provides a detailed review of Edison's upbringing, influences, successes, and failures. The dominant character of the inventor's personality was his single-minded vision of success: the way he practiced telegraphy as a young man (long hours where ever he could find them), the way little could thwart his visions of innovation, his genius for seeing analogies among various technologies, his charismatic ability to raise capital, and his lack of fear of failure. Israel's portrayal of Edison paralleled de Toqueville's vision of the quintessential 19th century American. The 'Inventor of the Ages' was both a man who knew that what was good today could be made even better tomorrow and one that favored practical, applied knowledge over theoretical and esthetic considerations - "less learnin', more earnin'." (I admit that the latter quote is actually from an episode of Family Ties guest starring Carl Reiner but it is still applicable.) This is perhaps best summed up in the revelation (to me) that Edison did not stop at inventing the light bulb - he invented electric lighting. However, Edison's single-minded dedication to technical innovation negatively affected his personal relationships and his esteem among the scientific community of the early 20th century.
Israel's biography is extremely detailed. The text contains a great deal of the minutia of the individuals with whom Edison worked and technical descriptions of electrical apparatus in which I (who has studied only the physics which accompanies a BS in biology) had little interest or comprehension. I personally would have been satisfied with more interpretation from the author.
Rating: 5
Summary: superb scholarly and technical treatment
Comment: I was given this book for a writing project and dutifully plowed through it over the Christmas holidays. Overall, I must say that it was an absolutely excellent holiday book as well as chock full of useful ideas for my scholarly purposes. This is an extremely difficult balance to strike and Israel has done it better than I thought possible - I was prepared for a long dry slog and instead found a great and exciting story.
Edison, Israel argues, was not just a lone little-educated tinkerer of genius as he is often portrayed, but the creator of the prototype for the modern corporate research lab - he knew how to find talent, how to organize it to get the most out of people, and how to beat the competition by both speed and in the creation of entire new systems of technology. He also knew how to manipulate the media and build on his fame, creating a myth to which he had to live up. That being said, he had a pitch-perfect intuitive sense not only of potential new markets, but of how to create technical solutions to exploit them. He learned from his failures and strove to apply his less-successful inventions elsewhere, often to great effect. Taken together, this was true business genius and Israel explains it all succinctly, including the exposure of Edison's many weaknesses in management and his financial affairs and his many flops (such as the mining experiments that nearly bankrupted him). Furthermore, the basics of his major inventions - improvements to the telegraph and telephone, the light bulb, commerical electricity generation systems, to mention a few - are covered with competence, always with an eye to the management of it all and what it took, all of which are of great use. This adds up to a masterpiece of scholarship and popular writing in my view, crossing a plethora of disciplines in very readable prose and at a good pace of storytelling.
However, there are many things that make this a challenging read and in some ways disappointing. Even though I know a lot about science and engineering from my own writing, I found the many passages explaining the nuts and bolts of his inventions hard to follow and ultimately rather dry. If the reader is not interested in these highly technical details, he can skim them without losing the narrative thread. Moreover, Edison as a person does not always come thru, though really he was his work and not much else. You also do not learn much about the fate of his enterprises or even his personal financial fortune after his death, which is also a part of his legacy that should be explored. Finally, Israel addresses somewhat rarified questions in the concluding chapter regarding whether Edison was a "scientist" and how industrial research was changing (developing specialties that required far more education than inventors of Edison's "heroic invention" epoch) to make the emergence of generalist, self-taught inventors like him far more difficult and with limited horizons; while I enjoyed this a great deal, it is of limited interest to those who were never steeped in "science policy."
All in all, highest recommendation. It is a great achievement and will stand as one of the definitive biographies of this great and difficult man.
 |
Title: At Work With Thomas Edison: 10 Business Lessons from America's Greatest Innovator by Blaine McCormick, John P. Keegan ISBN: 1891984357 Publisher: Entrepreneur Media Inc. Pub. Date: September, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: Uncommon Friends: Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel, and Charles Lindbergh by James D. Newton ISBN: 0156926202 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: June, 1989 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
 |
Title: Edison: Inventing the Century by Neil Baldwin ISBN: 0226035719 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
 |
Title: Thomas Edison and Modern America: A Brief History With Documents by Theresa M. Collins, Lisa Gitelman, Gregory Jankunis, Collins Gitelman Jankunis ISBN: 0312247346 Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
 |
Title: Thomas A. Edison: A Streak of Luck by Robert Conot ISBN: 0306802619 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: March, 1986 List Price(USD): $19.50 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
