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Jump to navigationJump to searchTesla & Twain by Debbie Elliott (view source)
Revision as of 10:39, 5 March 2010
, 10:39, 5 March 2010no edit summary
In ''Tesla & Twain'', Debbie Elliott expands this friendship into a novel that covers Tesla's competitive relationship with Thomas Edison, the hydro-electric system at Niagara Falls, and the infamous death-ray. It's an absorbing, fascinating and affectionate look at these two historical figures and it does a great job of bringing them to life. Twain is witty and debonair. Tesla is brilliant but embittered. Both men are ever so slightly eccentric.
Mark Twain is a big hero of mine and I think Nikola Tesla is an absolutely fascinating character, uncomplimented by history in comparison to Edison, his great rival, and so I had high hopes of ''Tesla & Twain''. By and large, they were satisfied. It's a novel, so not everything is perfectly true, but the book is extremely well-researched and Elliott has certainly stuck to the spirit of the historical record. She gives a real flavour of these two larger-than-life, slightly eccentric idiosyncratic men, but their oddities never detract from her portrayal of a pair of highly intelligent and original thinkers. The times in which they lived also come across well - the sky is the limit for these men, in a time of invention and progress, and Tesla's "patents on destructive terror" weren't quite the death rays they appear to us, more than a hundred years later.
In fact, my only real criticisms of the book are technical. Sentence construction can be a little gauche at times. Paragraphs are oddly presented like letters with an extra carriage return, which disturbs one's flow of reading. Elliott uses the ampersand instead of the word ''and'' throughout, which also disturbs the flow, and the proofing does leave something to be desired. Good punctuation helps the reader!
