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cphenly 's review for:

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
3.0

Read this for a book group. Would not have picked it up on my own, but it was pretty interesting. I didn't know anything about the "current wars," and if this book is anything close to historically accurate (and I believe that in essentials it is), then these people were just bad men! Cheating, back-stabbing, lying, even murdering over money, ideas, production of stuff (mainly lightbulbs), but mostly over money and ego. Thomas Edison was just not a nice guy! Neither was Westinghouse or his lawyer. And Nikola Tesla was one very strange bird. Gives you something to think about every time you turn on a light.

What kept me from rating it higher was that there are long stretches of quite tedious description/discourse/narrative that don't really add anything and which make the book too long. This story could have been told much more effectively in about 100 fewer pages. I was interested enough, nevertheless, to go get Moore's previous book, The Sherlockian from the library.