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Edison review: Edmund Morris biography gets things back to front

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The final work from the author of the Theodore Roosevelt trilogy ends up, like its subject, a bit too clever for its own good

Some biographers start with death – in medio mors, perhaps, rather than the classical in medias res. Benjamin Button-like, Edmund Morris works backwards through Thomas Edison’s life, from developing rubber with American plants through defence work in the first world war, hundreds of refinements to the phonograph, batteries, electric light in the incandescent light bulb, all the way to a boy in Marion, Ohio, and Port Huron, Michigan, selling newspapers on a train.

Related: Thomas Edison talks about electricity - archive, 25 November 1896

Edison was a man difficult to reach, often excessively demanding and having brutally high standards for himself

Related: 'What politics is': Sidney Blumenthal on Lincoln and his own Washington life

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