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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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