Edison

Edison- Edmund Morris
Random House
Release Date: October 22, 2019

Rating:
📚📚

Synopsis: Although Thomas Alva Edison was the most famous American of his time, and remains an international name today, he is mostly remembered only for the gift of universal electric light. His invention of the first practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago so dazzled the world—already reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of other revolutionary devices—that it cast a shadow over his later achievements. In all, this near-deaf genius patented 1,093 inventions, not including others, such as the X-ray fluoroscope, that he left unlicensed for the benefit of medicine.  

One of the achievements of this staggering new biography, the first major life of Edison in more than twenty years, is that it portrays the unknown Edison—the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the botanist, the wartime defense adviser, the founder of nearly 250 companies—as fully as it deconstructs the Edison of mythological memory. Edmund Morris, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, brings to the task all the interpretive acuity and literary elegance that distinguished his previous biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Ludwig van Beethoven. A trained musician, Morris is especially well equipped to recount Edison’s fifty-year obsession with recording technology and his pioneering advances in the synchronization of movies and sound. Morris sweeps aside conspiratorial theories positing an enmity between Edison and Nikola Tesla and presents proof of their mutually admiring, if wary, relationship.  

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Thomas Alva Edison, known today primarily as the inventor of the lightbulb, spent his life researching, experimenting, and inventing devices in nearly every scientific field available to him over the course of his life.  Edmund Morris' new biography takes a thoroughly-researched, detailed look into these aspects of Edison's life, hoping to leave readers (perhaps) with the sense of Edison as a Renaissance Man who unceasingly explored the world around him.  The reader learns of Edison's tireless efforts to perfect phonograph recordings (although deaf himself), his proficiency with Morse code, as well as the creation of inventions that, even after Morris described them, I had no idea what they were for or what they did.  

That is one of the issues I had with Edison.  In his push to show the reader all of the work Edison did, Morris overwhelms the reader with scientific information in some places and underwhelms the reader in others.  The main problem I had with Edison however, is that it is written backwards.  Starting with his death in 1931, each part of the book covers about ten years of Edison's life, retreating backwards in time until he's born in 1847.  This often made the reading choppy and the biography's progression difficult to follow.  Partnerships, inventions, lawsuits, and personal relationships end before they begin and often Morris has to refer the reader to later parts in the book to cover the beginning of something he's now talking about ending.   If there was a reason for writing the book that way, I couldn't tell what it was- except a desire to experiment and do something different.  In this case different was certainly memorable, but not, for me, in a good way.

Glimpses of Edison the man manage to show through Edison the scientist or Edison the businessman but those glimpses don't give the reader much of an impression of who he was or what made him the way he was. The impressions we do get show us a perfectionist, a tyrant, and a control freak. Meeting Edison like this at the end of his life, I have a hard time knowing if I didn't like this book because I didn't like Edison as a person, and had no investment in who he would become or what he would do with his life because I saw it from the end on, or if it was the book itself.  

Not a book I'd recommend for any but the most fervent of Edison admirers, and even then, I strongly recommend reading the book from end to beginning to try and make some sense out of it.   

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review