The Electric War by Mike Winchell - ADVISABLE

The Electric War: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Light the World by Mike Winchell, 260 pages.  Christy Ottaviano Books (Henry Holt), 2019.  $20.  

Content: Language: PG (1 swear); Mature Content: G; Violence: PG-13.  

BUYING ADVISORY: MS – OPTIONAL; HS – ADVISABLE  

AUDIENCE APPEAL: AVERAGE  

This book looks at how electricity came to be a major source of power.  Three men-Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse, all contributed to the invention and establishment of electricity in the United States.  The book starts out with the first capital punishment that used the electric chair and then flashes back ten years to show how the three inventors and businessmen surrounding light and power played manipulative games to get the corner on the electricity market.  

I couldn’t put this book down and was interested to find out that Edison didn’t play nice when bringing electricity to the world.  I enjoyed the simplified explanations about electricity and the back stories on each of the three men.  The violence is very upsetting because it describes the torturous killing of the man by electric chair and an experiment that involved dogs getting electrocuted to death-not quickly.  So although the book was informative and interesting I think the content puts it in the high school and makes it advisable instead of essential.

Reviewer, C. Peterson