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Summary
Summary
By age sixteen he was a piano virtuoso; by age twenty-one he was a faculty member of the University of Edinburgh; by age twenty-eight he had invented the telephone.
From Scotland to Canada to the United States, Alexander Graham Bell was a visionary who contributed to essentially every technological innovation of his time. His lifelong fascination with voice and sound and his tireless efforts on behalf of the deaf and mute truly made him one of the greatest scientists and humanitarians of the nineteenth century.
Leonard Everett Fisher's straightforward account of Bell's life will serve as a wonderful introduction to young readers of the impact Bell and his many inventions continue to have on daily life, more than one hundred years later.
Author Notes
Leonard Everett Fisher is a well-known and prolific author and illustrator of children's books. He has also written for adults and created illustrations for magazines. In addition, Fisher was dean of the Whitney School of Art and a visiting professor at a number of schools.
Fisher was born in 1927 in the Bronx, New York, and started to draw as a small child. After graduating from high school, he studied at Brooklyn College and then entered the army where he worked with a mapmaker. He holds a B.F.A. and a M.F.A. from Yale University.
The first book that Fisher illustrated was The Exploits of Xenophon, written by Geoffrey Household and published in 1955. Fisher then illustrated and wrote numerous books himself. He is well known for the Colonial Americans series, for the Nineteenth-Century America series for young adults, and for many other nonfiction works. He has written two works for adults-Masterpieces of American Painting (1985) and Remington and Russell (1986).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-5-Even in the age of the information superhighway, the inventor of the telephone still elicits a fair amount of attention. Fisher's biography does an adequate job of describing Bell's early life in Scotland, his interest in teaching the deaf, and his eventual emigration with his family to Canada. The rest of the book recounts his work on the telephone, plus other inventions, such as a metal detector and an artificial breathing apparatus, a precursor to the iron lung. The book is replete with the black-and-white acrylic paintings for which Fisher is so widely admired. Like his picture-book biographies on Galileo (1992) and Gutenberg (1993, both Macmillan), this title provides an overview of an individual's life and achievements without intimidating young readers.-Carol Fazioli, The Brearley School, New York City, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Featuring his signature, black-and-white acrylic paintings, Fisher's (Gandhi; Marie Curie) latest picture-book biography carefully charts Alexander Graham Bell's (18471922) career as educator and inventor. On most spreads, the copious text is set into the gray backdrop of the crisp, large-scale art, giving the volume a strikingly sophisticated look. But while the descriptions of Bell's tireless experiments will well serve youngsters researching his life, the text will prove slow-going for the casual reader. The writing is dense: on just one page, for example, Fisher discusses the influence of Morse code, Bell's grandfather, Bell's prodigious stint as a university student and his father's "Visible Speech" voice-teaching system. Only indirectly and intermittently does Bell's personality emerge. Readers learn that "Aleck" Bell was so involved in pursuing his future wife, the deaf daughter of a Boston lawyer who invested in his work on the telephone, that he failed to submit his patent application for the phone (the exasperated investor and father-in-law-to-be filed the papers himself). When Bell's newborn son dies, apparently of lung failure, "Aleck consoled his family, which now included daughters, Elsie and Marian, and secluded himself in his laboratory"; more text is devoted to his subsequent invention of the "vacuum jacket," a precursor of the iron lung, than to his family's or his own reaction to the tragedy. Readers will come away awed by Bell's visionary achievements, but will find the technological breakthroughs themselves difficult to absorb. Ages 7-12. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate) Here are two quite different biographies of the inventor that together provide a fuller than usual picture of the man, his life, and his work. Fisher's warm, storylike text with full- and double-page illustrations (in rather dark tones) provides a good introduction to the subject, while Matthews's longer book features many vintage photographs and drawings that richly picture the details of life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Matthews's personable text, Bell's inexhaustible curiosity emerges as his wide range of experiments are outlined; his concern for people and making their lives better is also made clear. Fisher's book is more of a straightforward biography, with the illustrations giving the text an intimacy and a sense of personal investment on the part of the author-illustrator. Both books capture Bell's apparently indefatigable energy and interest in the world around him. Always Inventing contains a chronology, bibliography, and index. e.s.w. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The downcast eyes and grave expressions of the monumental figures in Fisher's paintings set a tone that occasionally contradicts the text's exuberance, e.g., Bell's ``joyous capacity for learning all there was to know about the universe grew as large as his waistline'''but this recap of the inventor's character and accomplishments is engrossing reading and a grand tribute to an extraordinary imagination. Fisher provides detailed accounts of the inventions and incisive views of their significance; his pictures may lack the visual flash of those in Tom L. Matthews's Always Inventing (see review, below), but they provide clear, straightforward detail. The lack of a bibliography is the only disappointment; Fisher finds plenty to admire in Bell, as will readers. (diagrams, chronology) (Picture book/biography. 7-10)
Booklist Review
Gr. 3-5. Another in Fisher's series of illustrated biographies, including Gandhi, Galileo, and Marie Curie, this large-format book surveys the life and significant work of Alexander Graham Bell. Well-composed acrylic paintings in black, white, and many shades of gray include scenes from the inventor's life as well as a full-page portrait. There are also pictures of the original diagrams for the telephone patent and a chart of visible speech, a voice-teaching system perfected by Bell's father and studied by Bell. Readers will come away with a knowledge of the man's family, his career, his achievements, and his world. Written with dignity and without concessions to limited vocabulary, this clear, concise biography will appeal to readers of any age who want a straightforward introduction to Bell. (Reviewed March 15, 1999)0689816073Carolyn Phelan