A very good book, of the sort that I'm glad to have read but never really love.

It reminded me of my high school physics class, for which I had a brilliant, dedicated teacher who genuinely loved his subject and wanted all of us to love it as he did; tragically, I'm embarrassingly, stereotypically weak at science and math. It was like being tone-deaf, and having Mozart for a teacher. Similarly, I can tell that this is probably an excellent book, but while I can pick out the tune, I can't hear all its harmonies.

In describing the rise and fall of Bell Labs, this book focused on the men there, and how the basic research they did came to shape the technology that surrounds and envelops us now. Happily, there were quite a few local connections for me (a lot of the early part of the story takes place in the West Village in NYC, where I used to live), and there was enough biographical/historical detail for non-techie me to be able to follow the story. I appreciated learning the context, and I was particularly struck by the number of times a given fellow was marked out by his teachers and peers as smart or special. It was fascinating to see how often people could tell that about someone, often (it seemed) before he'd figured it out himself.

Oh, and one odd little note: There were quite a few quick physical descriptions, but as far as I can tell from this account, there were no fat men at Bell Labs. That can't be true, of course, but it seemed like almost everybody was either depicted as skeletal, or wiry, or wraith-like. I kept waiting for something like, "Unlike most of his colleagues, Joe was a big, strong, hefty fellow," but it never came. Weird.