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EDISON

A LIFE OF INVENTION

As much as any man in history, Thomas Alva Edison changed the fabric of everyday life. Here’s a big new biography of the great inventor, by a leading Edison scholar. Israel, managing editor of the Rutgers edition of Edison’s papers, takes pains to place the inventor in the context of his times. A good deal of attention is devoted to his early career. The son of Canadian emigrants to northern Ohio, Edison (1847—1931) learned to read and write from his schoolteacher mother, rather than from his sporadic formal schooling. His father’s books taught him the scientific method and analytical thinking. His first jobs were as a telegrapher, moving from city to city. His desire to master this skilled profession led to his first invention: a device to allow novice telegraphers to vary the speed of a message for practice. Edison’s growing body of experimentation was recorded in notebooks he kept as early as 1867, and from which Israel produces numerous drawings and excerpts. By 1869, his search for new telegraphic applications bore fruit in a service delivering financial news to brokerages. Edison quit his job as a telegraph operator to move to New York and concentrate on developing new inventions. There, with a reputation for cleverness and an ability to enlist wealthy backers, he was soon putting in 16-hour days fulfilling new contracts. His insatiable curiosity led him to branch out into fields ranging from metallurgy to plastics to, eventually, the triumphs of the electric light, sound recording, and literally hundreds of other inventions. Israel covers his career in depth, with discussions of technical considerations at the forefront, and frequent reference to Edison’s own writings and reported conversation. The inventor’s personal life, which he himself put a distant second behind his work, receives the occasional sidelong glance, though it’s hard to say that any great new light is shed on it. Exhaustively researched, with a strong emphasis on Edison’s methods and achievements.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1998

ISBN: 0-471-52942-7

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Wiley

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

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