How could Margaret Cheney (Tesla : Man Out Of Time) and Robert Uth (Tesla : Master Of Lightning) improve upon their past individual works (a book and documentary video, respectively)? By combining their efforts to produce this wonderful book, that's how. The informative text is interspersed with 250 b&w and duotone images that show Tesla and the era in which he excelled. Also included are 36 sidebars that explain some of the technical aspects of Tesla's works. After reading several other works on Tesla, I thought I knew it all. I'm happy to say that this book proved me wrong. Not to be missed by true Tesla fans.

Overall 'Tesla - Man out of time' is a decent biography of one of the most under-appreciated scientists of the last hundred years.

The problem with most biographies of brilliant and eccentric individuals, is that the books focus more on the times and people around the individual, then the individual themselves. After completing the book, we know about the people who Tesla met and dealt with, the inventions that Tesla developed; but really do not get an intrinsic understanding of what made Tesla tick.

On the downside, the book does not go into any real technical descriptions of any of Tesla's inventions and leaves a bit to be desired from an organizational perspective. Cheney occasionally slips back in time for different events.

Cheney provides an interesting insight into the jealous and greedy side of Thomas Edison and how Edison saw Tesla as a threat.

Overall, Tesla - Man out of time is well worth reading.

Ms. Cheney introduces the legendary inventor through stories from his life. Later on, the book focuses more on the technical aspects of his life (e.g. patents).

The book is complete with several photographs of the inventor and related material, and it lends itself wonderfully to any reader's understanding and awe.

I believe it is imperative for anyone who wishes to know the real stories of radio, alternating current, and the induction motor to read about how these marvellous developments sprung out of Nikola Tesla's creative mind.

"TESLA: Man Out of Time" is quite current, and the fascinating information therein is objective, allowing the reader to form his own opinions.

Indeed, everyone I know who was read this book wants to hear more of the man who invented the 20th century!

Excellent introductory work on one of the most brilliant scientists of the 19-th and 20-th Centuries.

Nikola Tesla is a fellow who gave us the System of Electrical Power (Generators, Motors, High-Tension Transmission Lines, Fluorescent Light) that lights our homes, runs our factories, trains, cars, our hydro power plants.

He opened our eyes and gave us pointers to follow with his basic patents in Radio, Robotics, Energy utilization, Communication, High-Energy and Plasma Physics, and many other areas of science and technology.

In addition to the above, as it was not enough, Tesla's genius ventured into many other fields. Over 400 US and Foreign Patents bear his name in the fields as diverse as "AND Gate" without our computers would not work, Bladeless Turbine with high efficiency, High-Frequency Heating Pads used in medical treatment of cancer, High-Voltage Coils that spark our gasoline powered car engines, and ... Please read the book!

Mrs. Cheyenne did excellent job in researching the material used to write the book. Someone in the field of electrical engineering might think that she graduated in Electrical Engineering, or Physics. For an amateur scientist reader the book is a very good source of references for further reading and study.

This book is a very good material for a high-school student that wants to enter the Electrical Engineering or Physics World.

I have been a fan of Mable Mercer since i saw her perform at the Downstairs at the Upstairs in NYC in 1961. I jumped at the cance to buy this book, wanting to know more about her. I managed to plow thru it since I was really interested in knowing about here life - but it sure was a chore to do so. This is perhaps the worst written book I have ever read. Redundant, terrible uncalled for puns - you name it. If you are a fan, do read it - her life story is there. But be prepared for a tortureous journey.
I would have given minus stars, but that didn't seem to be an option.

The composer Cole Porter preferred her rendition of his "It Was Just One of Those Things" to any other singer's. A skinny blue-eyed young crooner named Frank Sinatra used to jot down notes on a cocktail napkin when he came to hear her perform at Tony's, a club on Manhattan's 52nd Street. Sinatra would later say, "Everything I know about phrasing I learned from Mabel Mercer." Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Bobby Short, even Edith Piaf and the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor discovered in Mabel Mercer an artist of incomparable style and eloquence. From the 1930s until her death in 1984, Mercer was a singer's singer-a consummate interpreter of the popular song. She launched dozens of songs by Porter, Gershwin, Kern, Berlin, Arlen, and others that have since become classics in the repertoire. Mercer was, however, relatively unknown by the general public because she shunned fame. For much of her career, she performed almost exclusively in small nightclubs in Paris and New York. Not just any nightclubs, it should be noted, but the legendary cabaret clubs Bricktop's and Le Boeuf sur le Toit in Paris, Tony's,the Café Carlisle, and the St. Regis Room in Manhattan. Margaret Cheney's marvelous biography, the first full-length study of Mercer's life and times, will introduce many music lovers to one of the twentieth century's greatest unsung vocal stylists and fill in the missing pieces for the aficionados. The life itself was eventful from its conception. Born 100 years ago, in Staffordshire, England, Mercer was the daughter of an Anglo-Welsh teenaged mother and an African-American father. The child--of light complexion, blue-eyed, freckled, with frizzy black hair--was essentially orphaned when Emily Wadham ran off with her future husband (emphatically not Mabel's father Ben Mercer) to the music halls of Australia. Though raised by a kindly grandmother in a cottage in North Wales, Mabel suffered as a child, and for her entire life, from feelings of abandonment. The beloved grandmother died when Mabel was nine. Far too early in her life, she was entrusted to a convent school in Manchester run by Italian nuns; there the little girls branded the vulnerable Mabel a golliwog and tortured her because of her unusual looks and her orphaned status. At the tender age of 14, Mercer graduated from convent school and entered the music hall world that was her family inheritance. She took to it like a fish to water. In the years after World War I, African-Americans began coming in appreciable numbers to England and the Continent to perform. Eventually Mercer found herself living and working among black artists who were welcomed by Paris-the Paris of the Jazz Age. Midnight at Mabel's is especially fine on this formative period in the young singer's life. It was at Bricktop's, the great cabaret at 66 Rue Pigalle, that Mercer arrived at her elegant signature style. And it was at Bricktop's that the world of popular music composers and performing artists took note. In the 1920s and 1930s, and mostly in the wee hours, Mercer played with the best of them: Cole Porter, Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli. Even in the years of her early success a modest, very private and dignified person, Mercer was beloved of people in all walks of life. Among her many friends were British royalty, singular artists, like Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward, whom she met at Bricktop's, and adventurous tourists who had the wit to drop in at the Montmartre boite. In 1938, with the Nazi invasion of Europe looming, Mercer reluctantly, and with great difficulty, made her way to the United States. Several lean and lonely years passed before she reclaimed her rightful place as the toast of the cabaret world. But by the late 1940s, Cheney tells us of the New York music scene, "It became customary to say, 'Let's go to Mabel's!' Any club she sang in was automatically 'Mabel's.'" New York became the home she rarely left, except for weekends at her country retreat in the Berkshires. In the 1950s, Mercer occasionally appeared before enthusiastic audiences in clubs in Chicago and San Francisco. She annoyed club owners by refusing to book return engagements. However, Mercer's audience grew appreciably with the several albums she recorded for Atlantic, including two concerts with Bobby Short at Town Hall. But in the mid-1960s, rock music came to dominate the music scene on stage and in the recording studios. Club life in general, and Mercer's splendid career and the careers of her friends in particular, declined precipitously. However, near the end of her life, when she was prepared for poverty and obscurity, there came a final almost Dickensian turn of events. Mercer was discovered and celebrated by a new generation of fans, many of whom were gay New Yorkers. In her seventies and eighties, she was showered with honorary degrees and honorary appointments, television appearances and an award-winning documentary, concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Kool Jazz Festival, a triumphal return to London, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and so on. This was the kind of comeback, or vindication, a star performer might reasonably yearn for. Not Mercer, it would seem. For the first time in her life, and to her despair, she encountered autograph seekers. Cheney tells us that "biographers had often sought [Mercer's] permission to write her story but she wanted no part of them or it. After she was gone, she said, they could say whatever the liked, but while she lived she would have peace and privacy." In her knowledgeable, insightful and sensitive telling of her subject's life story, Cheney has succeeded in enlightening the grateful reader while managing to preserve a measure of Mercer's privacy. Mercer died of a heart attack in the early spring of 1984. Among the honorary pallbearers at her funeral mass were her good friends Bobby Short, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Johnny Mathis. One need hardly add that Mercer's legacy lives on in the great repertoire of American popular song.

Mable Mercer was the best...her voice, her style, her passion. All the great cabaret singers learned so much from her, about phrasing and interpretation. Few people know much about her life, so this biography is very welcome. She was of mixed race, and mixed cultures...she became a star very early, and then had a long career. Her fans were madly devoted. I was lucky enough to see her perform in her later years...powerful. A great, inspirational story; a terrific read.