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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49999.Edison_s_Eve_A_Magical_History_of_the_Quest_for_Mechanical_Life?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1170366084m/49999.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49999.Edison_s_Eve_A_Magical_History_of_the_Quest_for_Mechanical_Life?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/28141.Gaby_Wood">Gaby Wood</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6097835?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 3 of 5 stars<br/>The individual chapters are pretty much across-the-board fascinating, and the author's name is "Gaby", which is great, and as long as I'm poking around for more goodwill to offer toward this thing, I'll also say the cover design is beautiful ("Wait," you ask, "better than <i>Lives of the Monster Dogs</i>?" A: YES.), but the parts are easily greater than the whole, which would not normally be a problem, except the author (whose name, recall, is "Gaby"! and she sort of looks like Natalie from <i>Sports Night</i>: I can admit this much) feels the responsibility to constantly bring up what I take to be an eleventh hour attempt at a thesis tying the whole thing together. Which thesis is something like "an investigation into the point when the recognizably human and the recognizably unhuman intersect, and we look up from what we were doing and sitting to our left is Freud and sitting to our right is Masahiro Mori, and we're all, <i>Fuck this, I'm getting off the train</i>." <br/> <br/>Of course: without this thesis, the book would seem just as mismashish, and of course: I totally get the draw of adding a connective throughline to it all, but its sole effect is to bring up avenues unexplored by the author ("Gaby") and make the already tenuous grip some of the chapters have on it more slipperier (while I am far richer for having learned about the Doll Family, if the subtitle is "A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life" then why am I reading about the Doll Family?). And so: as this thesis is brought up so often and at such incongruent moments, I am forced to deduct ONE POINT FIVE STARS for the psychic toll it cost me and then ROUND DOWN because Natalie and Jeremy on <i>Sports Night</i> broke up (note: I am a Jeremy type). Thusly forewarned, you might enjoy this book more than I did and be more forgiving when you read it and want to give this book a greater number of stars. I am powerless to stop you, as I already got off the train. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/137408?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>