The Review
The Hysterical Side of the Historical Record
Edison’s Ghosts: The Untold Weirdness of History’s Greatest Geniuses, by Katie Spalding, New York: Little, Brown, 2023, 352 pages, hardcover.
Some histories are records of man’s intelligence. Others concentrate on the lack of it. What we have here inclines heavily in the latter direction, in certain regards. And it’s entertaining — squared, or cubed (in a nod to the mathematician who researched and wrote this volume).
The book is a connected collection — a full 30 chapters of risible, rollicking anecdotes — that generally treats us to the hysterical side of the historical record. You need not read the chapters in order, which presents readers with a cornucopia of options as well as a quandary: Which do you choose to examine first, among, e.g., “Confucius Was an Ugly Nerd with Low Self-Esteem”; “Ben Franklin Uses World-Changing Technology to Prank Friends, Self”; “Marie Curie Defies All the Odds to Accidentally Poison Both Herself and Thousands of Strangers”; “Charles Darwin: Glutton; Worm Dad; Murderer?”; “Real-Life Supervillain Nicola Tesla Takes the Term ‘Pigeon-Fancying’ a Bit Too Literally”; “Albert Einstein: Public Nuisance, Love Rat”; and many more.
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