Post by pennyt on Jan 27, 2017 9:08:57 GMT
Amazon synopsis:
New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history—and a vast fortune. A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul’s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country?
The task facing Cravath is truly daunting -- win. And the stakes are immense: the winner of the case will illuminate America. In obsessive pursuit of victory, Paul crosses paths with Nikola Tesla, an eccentric, brilliant inventor who may hold the key to defeating Edison, and with Agnes Huntington, a beautiful opera singer who proves to be a flawless performer on stage and off. As Paul takes greater and greater risks, he’ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem...
My thoughts: I always love a book that teaches me something (and/or makes me google stuff), and this faction taught me a lot about electricity in general, about why the current in our homes is alternating not direct, and about the lengthy patent wars and monumental battle for supremacy between Westinghouse and Edison in the late 19th century. It's also a book about ambition and about flawed genius, embodied in three of the greatest inventors of the modern age: Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla.
Though clearly a fictional infilling of some of the gaps in the history, the story is firmly based in the facts of the Wars of the Currents and most of the characters in the book are based on real people. It must have been an astonishing time to live through, and especially for the protagonists, with so many new inventions that were set to revolutionise people's lives - electricity itself of course, and the huge technological advances achieved by Tesla's invention of the transformer; the light bulb, which really did bring an end to true night-time, when all you had to do was flick a switch to banish the dark; x-rays (Roentgen flits through the book at one point); the telephone (Bell also has a walk-on part). And more gruesomely, it was out of the AC/DC battle that the electric chair was invented; that too has a scene all to itself in the book.
But almost as fascinating as the inventors and their inventions is the background of Paul Cravath, the novel's protagonist and, again, a real-life lawyer who was taken on by Westinghouse to fight the suits brought against him by Edison. Moore credits Paul Cravath himself with revolutionising law practice by bringing about the modern tutelage system. Furthermore, although he's only a minor character here, Cravath's father, Erastus, is even more interesting: the son of an abolitionist whose home was part of the underground railway network, Erastus himself went on to co-found the Fisk school, and later a network of other schools across Tennessee, for the education of freedmen and their children. I felt there's a whole other book to be written about Erastus. And, as Moore himself points out in his afterword, the same is probably true of Paul's wife, Agnes, who also features in The Last Days of Night and whose real-life origins are shrouded in mystery.
But the book isn't just a litany of fascinating facts. Thanks to a judicious bit of artistic licence on the part of the author with the timing of events, it reads like a thriller, with short chapters and rising dramatic tension as the antagonism ratchets up between Edison and Westinghouse, leading to industrial espionage and sabotage. All in all I thought it was a terrific read.
New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history—and a vast fortune. A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul’s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country?
The task facing Cravath is truly daunting -- win. And the stakes are immense: the winner of the case will illuminate America. In obsessive pursuit of victory, Paul crosses paths with Nikola Tesla, an eccentric, brilliant inventor who may hold the key to defeating Edison, and with Agnes Huntington, a beautiful opera singer who proves to be a flawless performer on stage and off. As Paul takes greater and greater risks, he’ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem...
My thoughts: I always love a book that teaches me something (and/or makes me google stuff), and this faction taught me a lot about electricity in general, about why the current in our homes is alternating not direct, and about the lengthy patent wars and monumental battle for supremacy between Westinghouse and Edison in the late 19th century. It's also a book about ambition and about flawed genius, embodied in three of the greatest inventors of the modern age: Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla.
Though clearly a fictional infilling of some of the gaps in the history, the story is firmly based in the facts of the Wars of the Currents and most of the characters in the book are based on real people. It must have been an astonishing time to live through, and especially for the protagonists, with so many new inventions that were set to revolutionise people's lives - electricity itself of course, and the huge technological advances achieved by Tesla's invention of the transformer; the light bulb, which really did bring an end to true night-time, when all you had to do was flick a switch to banish the dark; x-rays (Roentgen flits through the book at one point); the telephone (Bell also has a walk-on part). And more gruesomely, it was out of the AC/DC battle that the electric chair was invented; that too has a scene all to itself in the book.
But almost as fascinating as the inventors and their inventions is the background of Paul Cravath, the novel's protagonist and, again, a real-life lawyer who was taken on by Westinghouse to fight the suits brought against him by Edison. Moore credits Paul Cravath himself with revolutionising law practice by bringing about the modern tutelage system. Furthermore, although he's only a minor character here, Cravath's father, Erastus, is even more interesting: the son of an abolitionist whose home was part of the underground railway network, Erastus himself went on to co-found the Fisk school, and later a network of other schools across Tennessee, for the education of freedmen and their children. I felt there's a whole other book to be written about Erastus. And, as Moore himself points out in his afterword, the same is probably true of Paul's wife, Agnes, who also features in The Last Days of Night and whose real-life origins are shrouded in mystery.
But the book isn't just a litany of fascinating facts. Thanks to a judicious bit of artistic licence on the part of the author with the timing of events, it reads like a thriller, with short chapters and rising dramatic tension as the antagonism ratchets up between Edison and Westinghouse, leading to industrial espionage and sabotage. All in all I thought it was a terrific read.
