Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful book
Review: 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:
Summary: Wonderful book
Review: 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: 
Summary: Very unsatisfying
Review: I found this biography very unsatisfying. While it is considered the definitive Edision biography by the pre-eminent Edison scholar of the day, I thought that Edison was strangely absent from its pages. I thought that Israel gave short shrift to Edison the man and his family. Writing style is very dry--no personal details--only the big picture.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed Review
Review: I give this book a mixed review. It does illuminate the reader on the Edison method and personality, and his contribution to the development of individual inventions and--beyond invention--his desire to incrementally improve them to commercial scale. But, for non-technical readers, the book is very heavy on electrical engineering concepts which can be very dry and difficult to follow.
Rating:
Summary: Don't look for inspiration in this dry book
Review: I read this book hoping to really examine what made Edison tick and how was he so successful. I was largely disappointed. Whereas I do not expect an author to give a one sided story, Mr. Israel seems like he almost wants to break Edison down and tell the reader Edison wasn't so great after all. There was no insight into his genius or inspiration. The book seems to get caught up in timelines and specifics about inventions - the when and where - and little about Edison himself. While I am sure Edison was human and had his faults, it seems that Mr. Israel wanted to focus on his faults, failures and shortcomings. It was almost as if he took the approach "You thought Edison was so great, well let me tell you a thing or two about him that you didn't know." Even when he compliments Edison, he does it in a backhanded way. I am probably being a little skewed, and therefore unfair, myself. The book certainly has some excellent attributes to it - the photos and Edison's own sketches were interesting. The amount of research that was done, specifically the detailed research into his notes, letters and other documentation must have been enormous. The bottom line is that I was looking for an inspirational book on a true American genius and hero and I didn't get it. Perhaps if you are really looking for a historical analysis after reading a few other books on Edison this book will serve your purpose well. I will probably read another book on Edison hoping to get some inspiration.
Rating:
Summary: Don't look for inspiration in this dry book
Review: I read this book hoping to really examine what made Edison tick and how was he so successful. I was largely disappointed. Whereas I do not expect an author to give a one sided story, Mr. Israel seems like he almost wants to break Edison down and tell the reader Edison wasn't so great after all. There was no insight into his genius or inspiration. The book seems to get caught up in timelines and specifics about inventions - the when and where - and little about Edison himself. While I am sure Edison was human and had his faults, it seems that Mr. Israel wanted to focus on his faults, failures and shortcomings. It was almost as if he took the approach "You thought Edison was so great, well let me tell you a thing or two about him that you didn't know." Even when he compliments Edison, he does it in a backhanded way. I am probably being a little skewed, and therefore unfair, myself. The book certainly has some excellent attributes to it - the photos and Edison's own sketches were interesting. The amount of research that was done, specifically the detailed research into his notes, letters and other documentation must have been enormous. The bottom line is that I was looking for an inspirational book on a true American genius and hero and I didn't get it. Perhaps if you are really looking for a historical analysis after reading a few other books on Edison this book will serve your purpose well. I will probably read another book on Edison hoping to get some inspiration.
Rating: 
Summary: superb scholarly and technical treatment
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: superb scholarly and technical treatment
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Edison: A Life of Invention
Review: Mr. Israel has done an excellent job in capturing the human and scientific sides of Edison. After reading the book the reader has the feeling of actually knowing or having talked with the Inventor. Edison's entrepeneurship is an inspriation to all practicing engineers and scientists. The discussion of Mr Edison as a scientist or inventor in the epilogue is a lofty philosophical tratment(academic rhetoric) of an entrepreneuring individual that didn't add much. With this discussion all of the practicing engineers today are not scientist but inventors. The moving from this entrepreneurship in the educational institutions has been the disservice to the US industry, as shown by the ability of other nations taking over the industries such as electronics, autos and mechanical devices.The book is a must for anyone interested in innovantion history.
Rating:
Summary: A detailed exploration of Edison's life and accomplishments
Review: 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.
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