I found this to be a very entertaining read, which helped give me a real feel for the period when the electricity cables started to connect the cities and then towns of North America. Moore did a great job of invoking a sense of place and time. I felt the magic of those times, so appropriately generated, by profound technological progress. The alchemy of turning night to day was of an order of wonder only matched in my lifetime by the Apollo missions to the Moon.

    My difficulty with this reading is small and to many will seem pedantic. That being my strong preference that writers of historical fiction never play fast and loose with the known timelines of events. Facts and the time on which they act should be sacrosanct in the reporting of history. The writer should only weave his fiction, his story, on the solid framework of all commonly accepted truth. He may of course dispute details if there is a case to be argued, such that perhaps in one infamous earlier history ‘the princes weren’t suffocated in the Tower of London’ and Richard III didn’t have the extreme deformity reported by Shakespeare. However, to condense and distort events is to rip deep slashes into the fabric of the past.

     This book, despite telling the story so well can finally stand only as an entertainment; a first class one, an informative one, but mere entertainment nevertheless.

    Crude measure of a book should be awarded simply on the qualities of the writing, and so giving less than five stars where such banality is demanded would be disingenuous indeed.

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Tesla was definitely one of the greatest masterminds (if not THE mastermind) of all times. It is incredible, how much ahead of his time he was, and even though some of his beliefs turned out to be wrong or are outdated, in many concerns he is still pretty much ahead of our time as well.

I mean, imagine the first half of the 20th century, and Tesla is talking about wireless data transmission and interplanetary communication!

This book is just one of six in this incredible edition containing many of his writings and essays. It started with a couple of autobiographical essays or articles about his childhood, how he found out that he wanted to become an engineer, his studies and his first major inventions.

I did not fully understand everything, but still, it was fascinating and super interesting! What absolutely stunned me though, was Teslas writing style. It is really informative, sophisticated, but at the same time (overall) comprehensible (at least for me) and entertaining. I've read fiction with writing styles that are a lot worse.

I am really looking forward to the other five books!

I was always fascinated by Tesla and his incredible inventions, but I never had the slightest idea, that he was a great writer as well! Informative and entertaining! I do not want to but this book down.

A Kindle freebie, and about 40 pages long. My second star is generous, and mainly given because the spelling and punctuation of this peculiar literary object was OK. This is not a biography of Tesla, as implied by the title. It is two exhortatory essays in the self-help vein (the first on the nature of genius, and the second on creativity), with an abridged and rather simplistic summary of Tesla's life as the middle 30-40%. To read it, one would assume that Tesla qualified for sainthood, and those with whom he came in conflict (Edison, Marconi, and various industrialists) were villains of the deepest dye. The author's all for simplistic characterization, though, given that what this volume is really trying to do is promote his other "you too can be a genius" self-help tomes.

If youngsters are moved by reading this item to buy a proper biography of Tesla (as opposed to more 'what is a genius?' nonsense), then it may actually serve a useful purpose in this world.