Very interesting. The middle where Marc was discussing all his interactions with other countries was a bit confusing and monotonous. The theories at the end were thought provoking.

Tesla was one strange genius. I thought the book did a fantastic job showing every side of Tesla, good or bad. Or weird.
And Tesla was most certainly good and weird. He single handedly invented Tesla coils, three-phase AC, induction motors, neon lighting, bladeless turbines, radio communication, remote controlling, and much much more. And often he invented these technologies seemingly out of thin air, a fresh invention, so to speak. But I am amazed that someone could have such a developed understanding of physics in general while still wasting so much time and effort on things like death rays, communicating with life on Mars, telepathy, sending high voltages through the body for medicinal purposes (from headaches to bowel movements), high speed aircraft featuring a hot-air balloon, cosmic ray engines, thought recorders, force-fields, earthquake inducers, and too much more. And to make him even more of a mad scientist, he was unbelievably awful with money, had a super weird love life, and he would have spurious mental breakdowns. But when he needed to look the part, he could.

He was just... a weirdo. A weirdo genius.

A little on the academic side at times, but Tesla himself is amazing enough to make up for any downsides to this book. The author does a good job of presenting the revolutionary nature of Tesla's inventions to a non-engineering audience, while also investigating the social and political reasons why he is rarely remembered for them today. Certainly better than the incoherent mess that is Margaret Cheney's TESLA: MAN OUT OF TIME.

I was expecting it to be a bit dry, but this was parched

Tesla is a fascinating man, but the book became a bit tiresome. A biography half as long might be more fast-paced.

What I failed to realize when I started reading this book was how literal the title was. I was expecting a biography of the life of Nikola Tesla. Indeed there was a biography, however there is also a huge emphasis on The Life AND TIMES of Nikola Tesla. It seemed that every other page was filled with a bunch of extraneous nonsense that had little to no bearing on "the life" part of the book. A perfect example is that almost every event ever attended by Tesla was listed, which is fine, however the author deemed it pertinent to list every other person that also attended as if the reader was supposed to know who the eff any of these old school turn-of-the-century fat cats were. Another annoying feature of the book was brought up by another review I read on this site. This review pointed out that the author filled this biographical non-fiction work with phrases such as "Nikola Tesla probably [did this]" or "It is most likely Nikola Tesla [did that]". Well I can definitively say that the author most likely failed to do his homework and probably flunked out of biography writing class. What's worse, most people today don't even know who the hell Nikola Tesla even is (he gave us the AC current system, radio, remote control, and a crap ton more) and he certainly doesn't need half-assed biographies to help continue to suppress his name into obscurity. In fact, he needs a new york bestseller, which in my estimation is entirely possible. The reason I give this book 2.5 stars (yes, that's two and one half goodreads) is that the life of Tesla is so absurdly interesting that it is almost impossible to write a book that doesn't enthrall the reader. Therefore, I most likely probably give the life and even the times of Nikola Tesla 2.5 out of 5 electricities.

When I review a biography, I usually start by saying "look how awesome this guy is" and then rambling about his appearance, his style, etc.

Well, look how awesome this guy is. He's like a more dashing Marcel Proust. He's got a handsome but not showy mustachio. He's got that cool oiled hair thing going on.

But Tesla's coolness is more about his showmanship. He took this terrifying, new thing called electricity, stuff that comes down from the sky and explodes trees and cows, and he just sits there reading a magazine while it rages around him. Or he'll walk out on a stage into the midst of bolts of electricity, walking through it like it's a waterfall instead of magical death light, protected only by the cork lining his shoes.



And it's not just Tesla's wacky experiments that make him so compelling. It's his personality and his history of hardships. He's a tragic figure, the Melville of science, who ran into some fame and fortune, but was ultimately condemned to a life of struggle and a death alone in a hotel room.

I won't force you to read this book. But you should at least read the Wikipedia article because this dude is really interesting.

A very thorough take on Tesla’s life and pioneering work which continues to shape the way we experience everyday life. It is exciting to consider the feeling of seeing his work - such as AC electricity transmission, wireless communication, fluorescent lights and the like - for the first time. Tesla was clearly a visionary and ahead of his time. It was also fascinating to learn how his legacy was intentionally obfuscated to maintain financial interests for individual and corporate competitors. Unfortunately, Tesla may have made this easier as he often lacked the pragmatism, business sense and social awareness needed to succeed in the era of robber barons.

The author of this book chose to be exhaustive rather than entertaining. I’d describe this as a reference book on Tesla’s life - so if you’re doing a high school or college project about Tesla, here’s a source. One criticism is the book is written both thematically and, if possible, chronologically. This approach can be confusing as the same event will be addressed multiple time across chapters (How many times did his lab burn down? I think once but could have been 5… I should have read more carefully.)

It fascinates me !

DNF after 200-odd pages. A boring and unwieldy read. The translation is also not great.

This book is actually the reason I can't check out anything at the SF Public Library anymore. I took it out years ago, and by the time I started it, it was due back again. But being the lazy bastard I am, I just kept reading it because it was so engrossing, and never renewed it. Tesla was, next to Da Vinci, probably the purest and most intuitive scientific genius ever to have lived. He was also one of the most paranoid and eccentric, but really everyone knows that is a prerequisite for genius. Seeing how badly Edison screwed him over, and the personal hatred Edison had for him, was shocking, not to mention the experiments Tesla did in Colorado with 'free energy', make it worthwhile. Oh, and he designed and tested all his machines in his head, so they worked perfectly the first time he built them almost always.

Not the best choice for an audiobook - I grew weary of listening to the technical minutiae that I didn't have the background to grasp. I wanted to skim over those parts to get to Tesla's personality and relationships. He was an eccentric, born during a lightning storm, with a brilliant mind but with difficulties with relationships. He wasn't good with money, or women, and had a phobia of germs. And he was almost forgotten, his legacy overshadowed by Edison's.
Too much detail to get through in three weeks.