Rating: 
Summary: Great read, if you ask me!
Review: Mmmm... tough to reconcile the "customer" reviews I read hear with the VERY positive New York Times and Washington Post reviews this past week. I've heard from a couple of engineer types who raved ... saying Kemper really captured their world ..and then I happened to have an opportunity to see Kemper at UW Thurs evening for a reading. Interesting stuff. I read it for myself. If you are interested in the process of invention (hey, its messy!), if you like to see how some of the remarkable minds of our time work (Jobs, Bezos, not to mention Kamen), if you ever wondered what it was REALLY like inside the Skunkworks, or Edison's Lab, or the Wright Brother's bicycle shop ... this book is for you. This story about really remarkable people on a quest to change the world was engrossing. The success (or failure) of the Segway device itself seems irrelevant to me.
Rating:
Summary: Unputdownable - and DK gained my respect
Review: Yes, I have to agree with the positive comments in the other reviews - I'd definitely recommend this book.The author tries hard to point out Dean Kamen's flaws, which amount to benign interference in the work of his engineers (spurring them on to try out alternative ideas when they're already overrunning their deadlines), interference in the work of his CEO, penny-pinching when recruiting badly-needed staff, and so on. It's also not clear how much of the work behind Ginger was actually done by him, though he had the initial concept and some major insights into how it could be implemented. The author also tries to hint that DK's image as an indefatigable inventor living in a crazy house, playing with his helicopters and mechanical toys, is all a bit of a pose, which no doubt it is. But I was left curiously impressed by Dean. Whether or not he's taken more credit for Ginger than he merits (and there seems a bit of ill-will among his staff about this), there's no doubt that without him this invention would not have happened - not just because he owns an engineering company capable of building it, but because he saw something nobody else would have seen, and knew some crucial things about how to make it happen. Quite apart from this aspect of 'inventing', the author and everyone else seems genuinely awed by Dean's ability to persuade investors and suppliers that his idea really is going to succeed. Someone calls him 'the single greatest selling machine I've ever seen'. An entertaining example of this is how Dean manipulates a situation to get the famous photo of himself with Bill Clinton, sitting on his robotic wheelchair (precursor of Ginger), waving a brochure for his FIRST school engineering competition - and appearing on 60 Minutes in the process. After he and Steve Kemper fell out, he tried to persuade the author to withdraw the book. But Kemper was determined to go ahead with it, warts and all - except I don't see that many warts. Having followed the Ginger saga very closely as it played out in the media, I thought reading about the reality of the engineering process would seem pedestrian by comparison. And so it seemed at first, but as Ginger gradually emerged out of nothing, apparently with only DK believing his own spiel at times, I found the whole process unexpectedly impressive. As you can tell, now I'm a believer (perhaps I identify with Dean), and I'd be genuinely pleased for him if his idea does take over the world.
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