A review by snootycrumb
The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures by Edward Ball

3.0

An interesting piece of history, but this telling of it was confusing and far too long. It's the kind of story you can tell a friend in 10 minutes, and yet this book was 400 pages long. The chronology made no sense, jumping around all over the place, dropping pieces of the story all over the place like some kind of unfortunate Hansel and Gretel, but not really resolving how those pieces connected to each other in a coherent way. Ball also told the most interesting parts of the story in the first 100 pages, ostensibly as a teaser, but in effect made everything else seem really boring and disconnected. Not to mention the random parentheticals and moments when Ball inserted himself into the story. It was difficult to understand the nature of Stanford and Muybridge's relationship, which was what the book was supposed to be about. Overall, interesting topic but not well told. Muybridge was an important and fascinating man, but I wish I had gotten to understand him more.