"It is not humans that I love, but humanity". Born in Serbia, a true Balkan till end of his life, educated in Europe, where he lived for a while before settling permanently in America, influenced by Eastern religions (Buddhism) and theosophy, Tesla seems to incorporate many different ideas, attitudes, perceptions, interpretations into his worldview, and ends up becoming an enigmatic personality.A 22nd-century spirit bound by 19th-century constraints, a mind that conceived the shapes of the futur...

Nikola Tesla was an amazing genius. He came very close to winning a Nobel Prize, jointly with Edison. Tesla was an brilliant, arrogant, eccentric character, full of energy. He made numerous fundamental scientific discoveries, and tried, to some extent, to capitalize on his discoveries through a whole host of inventions. He obtained many diverse patents, but he had little business sense, and this was exacerbated by corporations that often infringed on his patents without offering compensation. Co...

3.5/5It has been done! This biography took me so long to read! I began in summer 2016 but couldn’t get into it. Picked it back up at the start of my fall semester this year but couldn’t get into it. Picked it up again at the end of the semester and forced myself to through.All in all his was a fascinating book that did an incredible job capturing the complicated life of an American Immigrant icon. While I was reading the book I struggled with how in depth and technical it got with his patents an...

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. S...

Tesla is one of the most awesomest coolio scientists evah. Totally. Check out what The Oatmeal has to say: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla.And if you're writing your dissertation on Tesla and need to know whether he was in New Jersey or New York on April 19th so that you can confirm that a conversation really took place, this is the book for you. It's great at that level of documentation. On the other hand, if you want to read about how awesomely coolio Tesla was, this book may make you want

This was a good but difficult book. The author is intent on putting down in meticulous detail the life of this amazing character and in doing so skips around with chaotic effect. Tesla knew and interacted with many famous people of his time and it was hard keeping track of his interactions with them as the author related stories and jumped from one character to another.The author relates in detail the many inventions and ideas that Nikola Tesla advanced that were subsequently used by other inven...

This was not an easy listen. Over 22 hours dense with information, including technical descriptions of Nikola Tesla's inventions!This being said, I am glad I bought this audiobook. It covers not only Tesla's inventions and ideas but also his cultural background, his relationships with quite a number of the luminaries of the times, as well as his physical and mental health. For this reader/listener with no electrical engineering background, the descriptions of Tesla's inventions and postulated th...

This book was long. I had my doubts about finishing this one in a month but I ended up wrapping it up in just over a week. Although, that has more to do with Tesla's character and his inventions rather than Author's writing style. Though, to be fair to the Author, he has done a decent job of making the book dramatic enough especially considering it is actually a Biography.It is clear from the book that Tesla was a Brilliant man whose ideas were well ahead of his time. At the same time, book has

I’m still looking for the definitive biography on Nikola Tesla because rest assured this isn’t it.The author throws non-essential information about like it was confetti. I knew from the first chapter when he starts with the history of Croatia that this would be a less than promising beginning. Unfortunately it doesn’t get any better. People keep cropping up who had very little contact with or influence on Tesla. Information on his discoveries are kept to a minimum while matters of who filed what...

This is a bit dry and very technical, but totally fascinating! Tesla’s life spanned 86 years and witnessed some amazing discoveries, many his own. He was an eccentric with an astonishing mind, living decades in NYC hotels, developing a penchant for pigeons, and was a self-described celibate. We can thank Nikola Tesla for many of our modern conveniences. And he was friends with Mark Twain which is pretty cool in my book.

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 r...

That Tesla was a genius is a given.This book goes deeper than that and at times he does appear to be a wizard. Highly educated, fluent in 12 languages, and a prolific reader Tesla even when young would not just accept something as fact just because some authority figure told him. If it didn’t make sense he would investigate it with vigour.That was both a positive and negative attribute as once he got something in his mind to work on he would do so without appropriate rest until he collapsed. He

No review of mine would be complete without a little backstory, so I shall share it now. I've been acquainted with the genius of Nikola Tesla for a long, long time. Ever since I've come to the realization that we owe that man a lot, I've striven to inform myself about the man and his work. I watched documentaries, attended lectures, read publications; I was terribly angry when the recreated Tesla laboratory in the Technical museum wasn't open when I found a time slot to visit it... heh, the only...

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but before reading this book, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had pretty much bought into the new age mythology that Tesla was a mystic genius visionary who was the victim of Edison's jealous, evil industrialist thievery and sabotage. Now, after reading accounts of Tesla's embarrassing social, financial and professional missteps, his ridiculous pleading correspondences to J.P. Morgan (and other wealthy would-be benefactors), and less than half baked journal submi...

I endorse this book. If this book were a person, that person would kick Chuck Norris' ass. If this book were edible, your head would explode from the sheer ecstasy. If this book were a sound, your ears would explode--twice. I must warn you, though. If you aren't worthy, then this book will burn your hands upon contact. Only the most devote individuals have ever been known to hold this book and survive, let alone read it.In other words, this book is awesome.

Tesla is da Vinci reincarnated! I'm certain of itRTC what an amazing man! 2017 Lenten Buddy Reading Challenge book #20

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.

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...

Nikola Tesla was without a doubt a genius when it came to electricity and engineering. Have you ever been in wonder at the electric power produced by Niagara Falls? Well, this was a product of Tesla's insights and work.The book traces nicely the trajectory of Tesla's career. We learn of his youth and his formative influences. He moved to the United States and began his work inventing devices. Early on, he came up with an electrical system--A.C.--as opposed to Thomas Edison's D.C. The two ended u...

This was quite a hard read, due to its length of 22 hours and dense descriptions of Tesla's machines and devices. Having read many Tesla biographies and books before this, it almost confused me. The narrator also made this book quite hard to listen to due to his overpronunciation of the letter 's' no matter where in the word the letter was.While the majority of the information was good, I disagree with Seifer's conclusions. One being that Tesla was homosexual; Seifer's argument hinges on the poi...

Nikola Tesla had abilities beyond that of many people, and though this book tried to present his life from all perspectives it is full of so much information pumped into so many different paragraphs that it becomes tedious. I had to take many breaks before deciding that this book is just a dry, hard read. I can usually push myself through a good book but how can one tell the story of a legend like Tesla in just one book? I'd much rather read the papers that he himself published and form my own i...

3.5 really...Wizard is the extremely comprehensive biography of possibly one of the most interesting men to have ever lived, a man so cool they had to get David Bowie to play him – Nikola Tesla.Before we begin, I should probably make it clear that while I am fascinated by science and the great thinkers that practice it, my mind does not work in that way at all (I only passed my Science GCSE after my mum condensed pretty much the entire syllabus into a series of silly cartoons a few days before m...

A thorough book about the life of Nikola Tesla. I am happy there is this book with much research having gone into his life to get an objective view of what was going on, why possibly he was the kind of person he was, and all the external factors forging his path in life as it did.

This is not a great biography. But the subject is so fascinating that it largely covers the significant flaws.First the flaws: The author is an unabashed fan of Tesla and clearly has an agenda to make sure that the reader recognizes Tesla above Edison and Marconi and the other giants of the age. For instance, he denigrates Edison as using the brute force of a massive volume of experiments to come to what works while Tesla would think it through and do the math and find what would work and then t...

I hadn't read much about Tesla's life and inventions, so I thought this would be enlightening and a pleasure to read. As a person interested in science and technology, this seemed like a great choice. Instead, it was pretty boring. In some ways, Tesla comes across as the genius he is, being at the forefront of the electronic age and developing solutions and ideas for wireless communication, light, and electricity for all. On the other hand, his financial problems and his issues with getting cred...

Awful biography. An interesting subject like Tesla deserves better than this mishmash. The pace is slow as chapters are one-year increments. The writing is god awful…an unintelligible mash of science, long quotes, letters and psycho-history/biography. There’s actually little narrative here and that fact highlights the author’s lack of skill…at times I thought I might as well read a volume of Tesla letters and avoid the author’s ineptitude…If anything, the author’s analysis is even worse than his...

This is a detailed (way too long) biography of the life of Nicola Tesla. It is dense, historical, and emphasizes the inventor's business dealings and patent turmoils. It goes into speculation about his personal life. It was painfully boring for me to read, but I stuck with it, out of misguided hope that the science of his inventions would be discussed. Eventually, I got to the part in the book where (spoiler alert) he dies. To my dismay, the chronicle continues, with government interest in his e...

A fascinating look at the life of a strange and brilliant man. This is very much a warts and all approach to his life, which is a good thing, in my opinion. Tesla may have been a genius, but he was not a very practical man, and he had a deep self-destructive streak to him. There's a lot of great stuff in here, not the least of which is the appendix which examines whether or not Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower, which pretty much destroyed him financially (and mentally) could have ever been successful

Spectacular...ly boring. This is such a long book, stuffed with technical information about Tesla's discoveries; which is fair enough, but the technical takes precedent over a cohesive narrative. The book follows a rigorous chronological order without attempting to try and make a story that flows. There are random insertions of history and notable people of the time; I think the intent was to provide colour and depth to the story, but they are so clumsily inserted that even if you were lucky eno...

After listening to 22 hours of this audiobook, I completely changed my mind about Tesla. I guess I thought he was left out of our U.S. history textbooks because he was a mystic and a misfit. Seifer points out the complexity of the man and the period in which he lived. Who would disagree with Seifer that Tesla was a genius with scant business acumen? Some of Tesla's inventions and discoveries that come rapidly to mind include wireless transmission, radio, polyphase electric system, rotating magne...