Audiobook
EUR 0.00
with membership trial

Hardcover
EUR 14.30

Paperback
EUR 10.67

EUR 14.30 with 56 percent savings

List Price: EUR 32.29

No Import Charges & EUR 9.14 Shipping to Netherlands Details

EUR 9.14 delivery Friday, May 1

Or fastest delivery Wednesday, April 29. Order within 1 hr 19 mins

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

EUR EUR 14.30 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Ships from

Amazon

Sold by

Trinity Alpha

Returns

FREE 30-day refund/replacement

Gift options

Available at checkout

Available at checkout This item is a gift. Change

Payment

Secure transaction

EUR 14.28

FREE International Returns

Super light jacket/cover wear. Inside is mint. Super light jacket/cover wear. Inside is mint. See less

EUR 9.14 delivery Wednesday, May 6

Or fastest delivery Wednesday, April 29. Order within 1 hr 24 mins

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

EUR EUR 14.30 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Sold by Cool Beanz Books and Fulfilled by Amazon.

Add to List

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (76) from EUR2.03

Image Unavailable
Image not available for
Color:

EdisonMerchant Video

VIDEO

Follow the author

Edmund Morris

Edison Hardcover – October 22, 2019

by Edmund Morris (Author)

(1,358)

Editors' pick Best Biographies & Memoirs

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"EUR 14.30","priceAmount":14.30,"currencySymbol":"EUR","integerValue":"14","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"30","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":true,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"A6DPB5As62YcsMW3NeglH4s68vRhOhFgIxkN2gRL96Ec6mJmypDPDgSnL%2B8V4Nu%2FZ67tLhY5A2KkGtkER4hLzejNhpxeZzNgSAy3XLi%2F%2BdQdKPxpzz0S%2BgWvLgfi6%2FzuaZeim3pawi4JUQluG0GuTfwxP5%2F%2B62yz%2Bu%2BKhdws9hD4pbd24ydc05LHbeS8BTSz","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"EUR 14.28","priceAmount":14.28,"currencySymbol":"EUR","integerValue":"14","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"28","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":true,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"A6DPB5As62YcsMW3NeglH4s68vRhOhFgfxuGlruuyl8VYTRj5iAtSDKFBVsc2AFNn4j8p9hLldRwQcGnfWOpmRiOkNoMnnIVd69192vL5nDF8Mxsf1Bn2qPeuwwU0EVA57HAa4qtfsnSypDrGwnYJGaS2ouby%2FmsHaiJRLGySv%2FFiXpjzcCY0g%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris comes a revelatory new biography of Thomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews

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 (“I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old”) 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.

Enlightened by seven years of research among the five million pages of original documents preserved in Edison’s huge laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, and privileged access to family papers still held in trust, Morris is also able to bring his subject to life on the page—the adored yet autocratic and often neglectful husband of two wives and father of six children. If the great man who emerges from it is less a sentimental hero than an overwhelming force of nature, driven onward by compulsive creativity, then Edison is at last getting his biographical due.

Report an issue with this product or seller

Print length

800 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House
Publication date

October 22, 2019
Dimensions

6.27 x 1.54 x 9.51 inches
ISBN-10

081299311X
ISBN-13

978-0812993110

See all details

The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

View Kindle Edition

This item: Edison

EUR14.10

Get it as soon as Thursday, Apr 30

Sold by SOUTHMIDWEST and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

EUR8.89

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price: $00

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World
Randall E. Stross

Paperback
EUR12.57
Get it as soon as Thursday, Apr 30
EUR 8.34 shipping
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Leonardo da Vinci
Walter Isaacson

Paperback
#1 Best Seller
EUR9.99
EUR 8.51 shipping
Einstein: His Life and Universe
Walter Isaacson

Paperback
EUR10.09
EUR 8.62 shipping
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
Ron Chernow

Paperback
EUR8.89
EUR 8.62 shipping
Edison - A Biography
matthew-josephson

Hardcover
EUR24.18
Get it as soon as Wednesday, May 6
EUR 8.42 shipping
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Who Was Thomas Alva Edison?
Margaret Frith

Paperback
EUR4.45
EUR 7.13 shipping

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for the Biographies of Edmund Morris

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“One of those rare works that is both definitive for the period it covers and fascinating to read for sheer entertainment.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A towering biography.”—Time

Theodore Rex

“A masterpiece . . . A great president has finally found a great biographer.”—The Washington Post

“As a literary work on Theodore Roosevelt, it is unlikely ever to be surpassed. It is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams’s volumes on Jefferson and Madison.”—The Times Literary Supplement

Colonel Roosevelt

“Monumental . . . Morris is a stylish storyteller with an irresistible subject.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Hair-raising . . . awe-inspiring . . . a worthy close to a trilogy sure to be regarded as one of the best studies not just of any president, but of any American.”—San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Edmund Morris was born and educated in Kenya and attended college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980. Its sequel, Theodore Rex, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 2001. In between these two books, Morris became President Reagan’s authorized biographer and wrote the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. He then completed his trilogy on the life of the twenty-sixth president with Colonel Roosevelt, also a bestseller, and has published Beethoven: The Universal Composer and This Living Hand and Other Essays. Edison is his final work of biography. He was married to fellow biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris for fifty-two years. Edmund Morris died in 2019.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

At seventy-three, with his wartime career as president of the Naval Consulting Board behind him, Edison tried to make sense of a new intellectual order that challenged everything he had learned of Newtonian theory. Abstract thought did not come easily to him. “My line of sorrow,” he wrote, “lies in the realm of technical science.” He needed to feel things come together under his hands, see the filament glow, smell the carbolic acid, and—as far as possible for a near-deaf man—hear the “molecular concussions” of music.1

Laws such as those of Faraday’s electromagnetic induction and Ohm’s relation of current, voltage, and resistance he understood, having applied them himself in the laboratory. But now, if only to slow as much as possible the entropy of his own particles (the fate of all systems, according to Lord Kelvin), Edison studied Einstein’s general theory of relativity.2 The recent solar eclipse had persuaded him, along with the academic scientists he mocked as “the bulge-headed fraternity,” that the theory was valid—even if it failed to suggest any correlation between his attempt to measure the total eclipse of 1878 and his subsequent perfection of incandescent electric light.3

The urtext of the theory, as translated by Robert Lawson, defeated him after only eleven pages. “Einstein like every other mathematical mind,” he scrawled in the margin of his copy, “has not the slightest capacity to impart to the lay mind even an inkling of the subject he tries to explain.” He turned for help to an interpretive essay—Georges de Bothezat’s “The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Glance into the Nature of the Question”—and filled thirty-one notebook pages with scrawled paraphrases of its main points.4

Gravitation is due to the retardation in velocity of the ultimate particle in passing through the fixed aggregates of matter. Ultimate particles fill the whole of space and proceed in every direction. . . .

He could imagine that at least in terms of his own observation, forty years before, of the thermionic emission of carbon electrons in a lightbulb after evacuation—a mysterious darkening since known as the “Edison Effect.” It was about as far as he ever got in his search for a “new force” in electrochemistry. Disparaged at the time by his peers, he now knew that he had discovered, if not recognized, the phenomenon of radio waves eight years before Heinrich Hertz.

Wireless waves cannot proceed thru space but thru Matter in combination with the ultimate particle. . . . From this, if true, all matter is formed of the same material.

Edison had once teased a science fiction writer with the notion of interchanging atoms of himself with those of a rose. He noted that Einstein envisaged particles in space with common axes converging into solidly constituted “rings,” while others remained ethereal. Hence the “primal ring” of the solar system, with its interplanetary nothingness.

We now have matter in a form which is polar & capable of producing what we call Magnetism & Electricity.

The religion boys, of course, would protest that what drew particles together was the will of God. Edison was as ready as Einstein to believe in a “Supreme Intelligence” made manifest by the order and beauty of the stars, and equally reluctant to personalize it: “I cannot conceive such a thing as a spirit.” The furthest he would go in the direction of metaphysics was to imagine the subcellular particles of a human being as “infinitesimally small individuals, each itself a unit of life.”5

These units work in squads—or swarms, as I prefer to call them—and . . . live for ever. When we “die” these swarms of units, like a swarm of bees, so to speak, betake themselves elsewhere and go on functioning in some other form or environment. If the units of life which compose an individual’s memory hold together after that individual’s death, is it not within the range of possibility . . . that these memory swarms could retain what we call the individual’s personality after the dissolution of the body?

Having thus anticipated by more than a century both swarm intelligence and DNA inheritance theory, Edison gave up trying to understand relativity and returned to the more tangible universe he preferred.

A Big Bump for Cookies

As he saw it, his first order of business in the new decade was to reimpose his own—highly individual—personality upon Thomas A. Edison, Inc., the sprawling industrial conglomerate that he had been forced to neglect during the war. He chose not to notice that it had thereby done much better than it had in earlier years, when he had run its manifold activities—phonograph and record production, movie making, cement milling, storage battery development, and laboratory research—with such autocratic willfulness as to make his executives despair of ever influencing him.

Edison was not an easy man to advise, being a combination of twinkling charm and bruising imperiousness. In his youth the charm had prevailed, but now that he was a septuagenarian and almost unreachably deaf, the urge to overbear had become a compulsion, and he had lost much of the bonhomie that had kept thousands of men working for him, and worshiping him, over the past half-century. Long gone was the perpetual hint of a smile flickering around the corners of his mouth, as if he were about to break into thigh-slapping laughter. The artist Richard Outcault remembered its radiance back in ’89, when “the boys” presented “the Old Man” with a gold and silver phonograph for his birthday. “Edison’s smile! [It] sweetened up the atmosphere of the whole building. . . . As long as I live the sweet spirit that pervaded the atmosphere of the laboratory will always remain with me.”6

Edison still moved with the jerky energy that kept him awake, and acting more decisively, than young men unable to match his eighteen-hour-a-day schedule. He regarded exercise as a waste of time, and sleep even more so. Since he was twenty, he had maintained his 175-pound, five-foot-nine-and-a-half-inch frame with only a few lapses, quickly corrected. (“I do believe I have a big bump for cookies.”) The most remarkable thing about his appearance, apart from the brilliance of the blue-gray eyes, was the largeness of his head, amplified by its thick mop of snowy hair. He wore custom-made size eight-and-a-half straw hats, and slashed the bands of his caps for comfort. His handshake was perfunctory and surprisingly cold. Monomaniacally focused on whatever current project interested him, he strode at a forward angle, hands in vest pockets, aware only of his destination and completely unconscious of time. He never wore a watch, and made no distinction between day and night, nodding off when he felt like it and expecting his assistants to follow suit. The same went for waking up. If two hours of rest was enough for him, he did not see why anyone else should want more.7

Lovable as he was—or had been in the past—Edison did not return affection, beyond the occasional beaming familiarity, in which there was often a note of tease. He thought hurtful practical jokes—electrified washbasins, a wad of chewing tobacco spat onto a white summer suit, firecrackers tossed at the bare feet of children—were funny. Having made money easily all his life, thanks to phenomenal energy and the mysterious gift of imagination (his personal wealth, at latest calculation, was almost $10 million), he was unmoved by the lesser luck or ill fortune of others, and casual about the loneliness of his wives. Now, returning to his laboratory desk in 1920, he was determined to teach Charles Edison a thing or two about running a large corporation.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 22, 2019
Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 800 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 081299311X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812993110
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.27 x 1.54 x 9.51 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #205,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Scientific Instruments (Books)
- #108 in Scientist Biographies
- #226 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
Customer Reviews:
(1,358)

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Edmund Morris

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Edmund Morris is one of America's best political biographers and journalists. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. He lives in New York and Washington, DC.

Customer reviews

1,358 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Customers say

Customers find the biography thoroughly researched and well-written, with one noting how the author conveys technical subjects clearly. The book receives positive feedback for its character portrayal, with customers describing Edison as a remarkable man. However, the narrative structure receives mixed reactions - while some find it interesting, others consider it tedious to read and confusing to follow. The time sequence is particularly problematic, with customers describing the timeline as a jumbled mess.

AI Generated from the text of customer reviews

Select to learn more

73 customers mention content, 65 positive, 8 negative

Customers find the book fantastic and interesting to read, with one customer noting it covers an amazing career.

Great book hard to get used to going backwards.... From end of his life at start of book to beginning if life at end of book.... Benjamin Bunny style?Read more

...Not persuasively spell-binding, but good, solid writing.Read more

...Won't argue that some of it was very interesting and informative, but not on a whole a waste of time and money....Read more

Bought it for my wife, she read it, thought it was a great read!Read more

71 customers mention informative, 54 positive, 17 negative

Customers find the biography informative and well-researched, with detailed coverage of Thomas Edison's life and technical subjects explained clearly.

...confusing given the reversed time progression but otherwise an excellent biography of an incredible man.Read more

...Large sections of it that are so technical and detailed that my eyes glazed over and I skimmed over the material....Read more

While in general a good history, the author decided to present the material in reverse chronological order which makes linking individuals and...Read more

...Also, there is too much detail about some of his experiments leaving the reader in the "who really cares" mode....Read more

37 customers mention writing quality, 26 positive, 11 negative

Customers appreciate the writing style of the biography, which is interesting and written backwards, with one customer noting it is written with a love of the subject.

This is an excellent biography of Thomas Edison. It is well written, and wonderfully well researched....Read more

This book is very well written, detailed and exhaustively researched. I learned a lot about TEE....Read more

...If not, then you should read this book backwards since it is written backwards....Read more

A well-written book about a man who was ingenious and discovered startling things in his day that are so integral as to be commonplace today in most...Read more

12 customers mention character, 10 positive, 2 negative

Customers appreciate Edison's character, describing him as a remarkable man, with one customer noting how well his personality traits are portrayed in the book.

...Truly an incredible man and this book does a great job of taking you through his life a decade at a time - but backwards!...Read more

...A brilliant man, that accomplished a great deal, I’m just not sure he was ever a successful human being. He’s a tough subject.Read more

Very interesting biography of an impressive man....Read more

...He said he learned so much about this amazing fellow and highly recommends the book!Read more

13 customers mention story, 9 positive, 4 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's narrative, with some finding it an amazing life story, while others point out issues such as lack of continuity and difficulty understanding the sequence of events.

A very interesting story that is told well by the authorRead more

Covers the incredible life of this true America genius. Written in a way to hold interest.Read more

...As a result it lacks continuity which makes understanding Edison’s life clumsy and difficult....Read more

Sad that Mr. Edison did not credit his Creator, but an amazing life, none-the-less.Read more

21 customers mention readability, 3 positive, 18 negative

Customers find the book difficult to read, describing it as tedious and weird to read in reverse order.

...history as written without dates of any sort, it is just plain tedious to read....Read more

Do not like the style it is written hard to follow and hard to finishRead more

...Whatever the case, it almost makes the book unreadable. Which is a shame....Read more

...It is a Benjamin Button-esque approach to biography. It is not reader-friendly and evokes some head-scratching....Read more

15 customers mention clarity, 1 positive, 14 negative

Customers find the book difficult to follow, with several mentioning it is very confusing to read.

Difficult to follow as the author did not use a chronological approach to Edisons life. Did not like it much for that reason.Read more

The book is confusing and poorly organized. The Roosevelt books are much better.Read more

The book goes backward in time, which is quite confusing and I think done to mask the fact that it is at best a spotty biography and nowhere near a...Read more

Who writes a biography backwards. So disjointed and hard to follow with too much technical information and very little about the man himself....Read more

11 customers mention time sequence, 1 positive, 10 negative

Customers find the time sequence of the book confusing, with the narrative going backwards in time and the timeline described as a jumbled mess.

The way that it wasn't chronological and was separated by topics / areas of work was problematic to me.Read more

The book goes backward in time, which is quite confusing and I think done to mask the fact that it is at best a spotty biography and nowhere near a...Read more

Unfortunately, this biography is not composed in a chronological time sequence, but rather, the chapters are arranged by Edison's inventions...Read more

The reverse time line was confusing The author was in over his head in technical matters which is most of the book.Read more

Reviews with images

See all photos

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.

Andrew Baron
Lots of new and engaging, historically-footnoted information
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2019
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

As a frame of reference, over the past four and a half decades I've read all of the Edison and Tesla biographies, going back to the first "Edison & His Inventions" of 1879. I was delighted to learn much more from this new biography than I have from the others, with much new and enriching material presented, all carefully footnoted and referenced. Of particular interest are several pieces of communication and comments that Edison and Tesla made to and about each other, which cast a very different light on the popular conception of their relationship.

Most of the Edison biographies (and Tesla's as well) have been highly derivative of content from prior published work, and if footnoted sources were given at all, they often led to a source that itself was not footnoted or was absent of any referenced primary historical data at all. Other biographical work that has done a fine job of maintaining professional and historical integrity, has nonetheless been of a scholarly bent and might not appeal to a general audience. I am giving Edmund Morris's book 5 stars because he not only provides voluminous original source material references, but because he writes as a mature author who knows how to put the pieces together, and when he does editorialize it is with unusual insight that rings true to this seasoned reader. Morris knows and portrays his subject and his subject's personality traits unusually well, and does not shy away from conveying the personality flaws that make Edison such a complex character. This is not a hagiographic account, so those looking for hero worship of a saintly personality may be disillusioned.

What does come through however, in addition to the flaws, are those aspects of the man that are honorable and noteworthy. Those for whom Edison has had enduring appeal will likely come away with a deeper appreciation of the inventor's personality and its influences, shaping the man he ultimately became.

Reviews have commented on the author's peculiar choice of telling the story chronologically backwards. This does take some getting used to and can be momentarily disorienting, but I think I understand the author's intent. As each layer of Edison's challenges, his reactions to them and their consequences gets peeled away, the more clearly and plainly we comprehend how his personality evolved. There is something uncannily effective about the journey toward a greater innocence and naivety, as we gradually come to understand how these traits became leitmotifs in Edison's life, as others came to be added, along the way to a long and remarkable life.

Read more

17 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
Kevin Quinley
Benjamin Button-esque, Unorthodox Biography, Exhaustive and Exhausting
Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2021
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
The book is an exhaustive -- and at times exhausting -- treatment in detail of Edison's life. Large sections of it that are so technical and detailed that my eyes glazed over and I skimmed over the material. You will get a deep dive into electricity and various engineering minutiae of Edison's prolific inventive mind.

What comes through was Edison's almost superhuman, inexhaustible, indefatigable energy and intellectual wattage. He would work for long stretches of time without sleeping or eating, so focused on his experiments, inventions and projects. His mind was constantly churning with ideas as he filled notebooks with future visions and projects. He would try hundreds, thousands of methods and experiments until he found a solution to the problem that he was tackling. His intellectual persistence seems superhuman. It is hard to think of another individual who was his prolific and productive through sheer output of ideas and ingenious inventions.

This is not a hagiography, however, that lionizes Edison. Feet of clay show through. The book shows him, warts and all. He seemed to lack business savvy and flirted with financial problems despite the massive financial windfalls available from his various inventions, patents and products. He wed twice, but one gets the impression that he essentially lived a life separate from his wives, so absorbed was he with his work. His children became afterthoughts as well; it is hard to say that he had any relationship with them other than monetarily. He fathered children, but did not seem to be much of a Dad to his children, many of whom suffered from lacking much other than a genetic/biological relationship with him.

The curious feature of this book is its unorthodox structure and organization. I am a huge fan of Edmund Morris and -- in particular -- his three-volume opus on the life of Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike those books, however, Morris opts for a weird organizational structure to this biography. Essentially, he begins the book at the end of Edison's life and then works backwards in roughly ten-year chunks from the end-of-life, ending with Edison's boyhood in Ohio. It is a Benjamin Button-esque approach to biography. It is not reader-friendly and evokes some head-scratching.

One might expect that, in a Preface/Foreword, either Morris or his Editor posthumously would have provided context for the unorthodox, counterintuitive anti-chronological approach used here. It's almost as though Morris was saying, "I did it because . . . well, I can!"

As other reviewers have correctly noted, one workaround is to simply read the chapters in reverse order. I chose not to do that, but why not make the manuscript as reader-friendly as possible or provide context for the unorthodox biographical approach? A rhetorical question but a legitimate one nonetheless.

Ultimately, this was a detailed biography of perhaps America's most prolific inventor. The technical details and approach to the narrative however at times tested my willpower to grind on through to the very end. Your mileage may vary.

Read more

25 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
Brian S.
Excellent biography about one of history's greatest inventors
Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Edmund Morris' biography of Thomas Edison is outstanding and comprehensive. It covers Edison's entire life (warts and all!) in glorious detail. The book is very well written and very readable.

The bottom line is that Edison is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in a good biography.

The book has extensive notes, and they contain a considerable amount of additional information. There's also a bibliography.

Read more

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report

Top reviews from other countries

Abraham Mathews
Edison Biography ❤️
Reviewed in India on December 11, 2024
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

- Good print quality
- I have started to read: enjoyable

Read more

Abraham Mathews

Edison Biography ❤️

Reviewed in India on December 11, 2024
- Good print quality
- I have started to read: enjoyable

Images in this review

Report
Arend Smid
It's a book.
Reviewed in Canada on December 18, 2019
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Educational..?

Read more
Report
Amazon Customer
Great read, well structured
Reviewed in Australia on November 3, 2021
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
Loved the book

Read more
Report
Cliente Kindle
Tried to be original, screwed up big time.
Reviewed in Brazil on June 12, 2025
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
This book was written in a very weird chronological order, in which it starts recounting the last decade of Edison's life in chronological order, than goes back to the prior, and so on. It is a complete mess of back-and-forth history with characters going and coming in a very mangled and confusing way. There is a linearity on how Edison went from one topic to another, but this book obliterated it. Also, too much emphasis was given to business intrigues and too little on the very interesting personality and thinking of Edison. I think the author tried to be original with this convoluted timeline, but ended screwing up big time.

Read more
Report
Don
The best biography of Thomas Edison, detailed and documented.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 20, 2021
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
As much about business as invention. An implicit guide to life: Half what to do and half what not to do. Edited, you might say, by Sigmund Freud.

Read more
Report

See more reviews

Price		EUR 14.30
AmazonGlobal Shipping		EUR 9.14
Estimated Import Charges		EUR 0.00

Total		EUR 23.44

Shipping & Fee Details

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Image Unavailable

Follow the author

Edison Hardcover – October 22, 2019

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customers also bought or read

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Product Videos

About the author

Edmund Morris

Related books

Customer reviews

Customers say

Select to learn more

Images in this review

Reviews with images

Informative and interesting!

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.

5.0 out of 5 stars Lots of new and engaging, historically-footnoted information

4.0 out of 5 stars Benjamin Button-esque, Unorthodox Biography, Exhaustive and Exhausting

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent biography about one of history's greatest inventors

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Edison Biography ❤️

Edison Biography ❤️

Images in this review

5.0 out of 5 stars It's a book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great read, well structured

1.0 out of 5 stars Tried to be original, screwed up big time.

5.0 out of 5 stars The best biography of Thomas Edison, detailed and documented.

Lots of new and engaging, historically-footnoted information

Benjamin Button-esque, Unorthodox Biography, Exhaustive and Exhausting

Excellent biography about one of history's greatest inventors

Edison Biography ❤️

It's a book.

Great read, well structured

Tried to be original, screwed up big time.

The best biography of Thomas Edison, detailed and documented.