"The first full-scale life based on the voluminous Bell papers. It is an absorbing story. . . . The technical trials and errors, Bell's almost naive persistence, the actual components he worked with, are all attentively documented by Professor Bruce. We are, as well, given a vivid picture of the human environment out of which the telephone emerged, as one individual after another, each of immense importance to Bell, sought to advise, encourage, deter, rectify his failings or even defeat him. . . . It is in Bruce's account of Bell's life after the telephone . . . that the man himself emerges and the book takes on its most powerful interest. It becomes, as the author writes, a study not of long adversity culminating in a final crescendo of triumph, the usual pattern for heroic tales, but of a long personal struggle against the deadening handicap of early fame. . . . As it turns out, Bell's post-telephone days, from 1876 to August, 1922, when he died at age 75, were in many ways his best."—New York Times Book Review