Readers will share Munson’s frustration at this seeming frittering of a magnificent talent, but they will absolutely enjoy...
A lucid, expertly researched biography of the brilliant Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), a contemporary and competitor of Thomas Edison who was equally celebrated during his life.
Munson (From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity, 2005, etc.), who directs the Environment Defense Fund’s clean energy work in the Midwest, emphasizes that Tesla was a prodigy starting from his childhood in Serbia. Coming to the United States in 1884, he worked for Edison, whose company was installing the first electric lighting in American cities using complex direct current generators, which were limited to transmitting short distances and suitable only for electric lighting. An eccentric workaholic who knew far more science than the uneducated Edison, Tesla had been working on an efficient alternating current system. Edison rejected it, but George Westinghouse hired Tesla; after a bitter, decadelong “war of currents,” Tesla emerged victorious. His AC “dramatically expanded the potential market for electricity, allowing it to be sold not just at night for lighting but also during the day for factories, appliances, and streetcar lines. For the first time, [AC] could be pumped for hundreds of miles and efficiently power machines as well as lamps.” By the 1890s, Tesla was a wealthy celebrity whose lectures thrilled audiences with demonstrations of spectacular electrical phenomena. Although he continued to invent and patent essential features of radio, wireless telegraphy, and even computers, he grew obsessed with visionary, expensive megaprojects—e.g., wireless power transmission—most of which never panned out. Investors stopped investing, and he spent his final decades entertaining journalists and the public with sometimes-accurate, often wacky predictions but producing little of commercial value. As the author notes, “he believed the joy of inventing went beyond the accumulation of profits.”
Readers will share Munson’s frustration at this seeming frittering of a magnificent talent, but they will absolutely enjoy his sympathetic, insightful portrait.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63544-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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