Customer Reviews

The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

If you want to find out technical information about how the grid works or a thoughtful history don't bother with this book. But if you are looking for a science/history book to read at the beach, this is the one. Lots of geewiz stuff but no real detail. Nothing wrong with that. There is a place for a book that makes you feel awe and wonder and this book certainly does that but it left me feeling like I had skipped dinner's main course and went straight to desert.

Browsing through a bookstore the other day, I ran across this title... The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World by Phillip F. Schewe. I got a copy of it at the library, and was expecting a decent education on how our power systems work. What I ended up with was something a bit different, and it wasn't as good as I had hoped for...

Contents: The Gridness of the Grid; Grid Genesis; Most Electrified City; Imperial Grid; Worst Day in Grid History; Thirty Million Powerless; Overhauling the Grid; Energizing the Grid; Grid on the Moon; Notes; Acknowledgments; Index

With a title like this, I expected the writer to start at the beginning, in the days of Westinghouse and Edison. From there, I had hoped for a relatively comprehensive history of how our nation has become electrified, along with some details as to how it all works. And to some degree, that's in there. But it's ladled out with a heavy dose of philosophy and comparisons to people like Thoreau and his simplistic lifestyle at Walden Pond. These forays into the contemplation of our electric lifestyle seemed to distract from what could have been a rather compelling read. I was also a bit frustrated by all the time that was spent on the 1965 power outage that plunged 30 million people on the east coast into darkness. Yes, it's a telling story of how intertwined our systems have become, as well as how much we rely on electricity. But it seemed that he could have covered that in less space, leaving more room for other directions where I hoped we would be going.

I don't consider the book all bad. The writing style was somewhat unique, in that it was written in that "yes, I'm talking to you, Mr. Reader" tone. And for the material that was covered, the story was interesting. It's something we take for granted (flip a switch, and there's the power), but it's also something that can be disrupted by many different unforeseen forces. But at least in my view, the book could have done more with facts and stories, and less with philosophizing and navel-gazing...

This book provides an entertaining and comprehensive view of how electric power was and is created and delivered ("the grid"), and the style is anything but dry. From the grid's beginnings at the hands of Thomas Edison in the Pearl Street generating station in the 1880s to the issues of production and energy efficiency that are the concerns of today, this book touches on it all. The strongest parts are the story of the beginning--Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, and Insull--the story of the TVA, and the description of the 1965 blackout. I was disappointed, though, that there wasn't more coverage of recent failures, especially the 2003 blackout which is tantilizingly described as being very similar to 1965, but with little detail.

As the introduction says, this is not a comprehensive technological history--for that, one would have to look elsewhere. I wish the author had given more hints about just where to look--the text is well-footnoted, but it's not clear from the bibliography which references would be most interesting to read next. The story also focuses on the U.S. grid, but there's plenty of information about other countries as well.

It's too bad that aren't any photographs: much of this book is about things (power stations, generators, etc.) and about people, and it would be nice to see what some of them look like. A lot of books in the "microhistory" genre have the same failing. It's a pity that publishers are too cheap to include a few pages of photos.

Marketed as an explanation of our power system, "Grid" is amazingly bereft of any information not available in any newspaper. Instead of providing details of the intricacies of the grid, the first half of the book is a shallow history of electrical technology. Here, Schewe displays his gift of boring writing, as it takes a perverse talent to ruin the marvelous story of The War of the Currents.

If "Grid" is written in a "popular" style, then popular must mean dumbed waaay down, as this book on technology reads more like an article found in "Boy's Life." In the history section, Charles Steinmetz is never mentioned, but we learn the amazing fact that General Electric became known as "GE for short."

The second half of the book is even worse. In place of detailed knowledge about the complex electrical system, we are given the news that today, alternative generating sources such as wind and solar are available. Oh, really? If you don't already know 90% of what's in the padded pages of this book, you must have just come out of a Rip-Van-Winkle coma.

Worst of all is the grating style of writing that's a torture to read - e.g., "What next? Thoreau would ask. Perhaps the grid will also think for you. Plug your mind into the wall and out comes thinkicity." The book is filled with rancid metaphors, repetition, repetition, repetition, and tautologies such as "The gridness of the grid."

Horrible.

Worst book I've bought for 20 years. Padded with an absurdly irrelevant chapter on landing on the moon, utterly free from even pedestrian technical content, trivialized renderings of the "personal stories" of important men, how his brother's friend the lineman avoids electrocution when going up a pole -- it's all that and less! Some space is provided to Amory Lovins' work, causing Lovins to endorse it, to his shame. The worst part of the book is the intellectual pretensions of the author, who writes utterly irrelevant peans to Thoreau, as if that belonged in a book about a tricky technology that ought to have been intrinsically fascinating. If you want to know why one part of the country pays more for electricity than another, read something else. If you want to find out why the grids aren't universally interconnected, ditto. And don't go for foreign content, either. That is discarded in a dozen pages. Ugh!

I came to this site to write a 5-star review and was puzzled to see that a number of less enthusiastic reviewers had panned "Grid." I suppose readers have highly variable expectations. I came to the book with a lot of knowledge of the subject, looking for clear and lively reading for my undergraduate students in a course on energy policy, and for that Schewe's book is admirably suited. Unlike some negative reviewers, I thought the book an excellent overview of the grid, its history, its technology, and some of its major problems and prospects. Schewe likes word play, providing a chuckle per chapter, but perhaps others find his embedded jokes corny -- or miss them altogether. Anyway, my thumbs are up. This is an intelligent book, well researched and well written.

I read this book while I was working at a nuclear power plant. It really opened my eyes to the world of electricity - who makes it and how it get transferred to our homes.

This book opens the eyes to the past, present and future of an industry everyone in developed countries is dependent on. It's not dry or technical, but delightfully relates the people and the events in a way which is interesting to any layman.

After reading this book, I did some calculations and found that 17.5% of our energy produced is lost between the grid and our homes. There's a lot of room for improvement there; many of the topics discussed in "The Grid" are useful and relevant to our current energy problems.

The Grid was so good I passed the book on to my father, who loved it, and then passed it on to my 14-year-old brother. I hope you all enjoy reading this book as much as I and my family did.

The author ruins what could have been a fascinating historical exercise with a mind-numbing stream of nonstop superlatives and unnecessary, cutesy metaphors. It gets impossible to chew through by about page 20. Extremely disappointing.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this book does not really try to explain how the electrical grid actually works. I do think it does a somewhat acceptable job of telling the early history and development of the electric grid sans technical details, and in that sense it is useful.

That being said, the work is highly repetitive, rehashing events multiple (three or four) times. I'm thinking the author does this for artistic purposes or to tell more of a cohesive story, so I'm not really faulting him on it, Furthermore, I can imagine if you read this book over the course of six months this feature would prove helpful, but if you read it over a single weekend it gets really annoying. You could probably shave twenty pages off of the book by getting rid of all of these little rehashes.

In my opinion, if you want a work dealing with electrical grid development and society, you may want to look more towards the works by David Nye. While some of his works are definitely more "academic" his recent book entitled "When the Lights Went Out" could be a good start, and you could go from there.

I didn't intend to write a customer review today until I saw the few really negative reviews. I couldn't pass by without trying to remedy the damage some of these might do in terms of turning people away from reading this excellent book.

Not everybody has an in-depth understanding of electricity, nor even a superficial knowledge of the people involved in unraveling its mysteries. "The Grid" is a great way to close that gap in one's knowledge. Another recent book that dovetails nicely with "The Grid" is Jill Jonnes "Empire of Light: The Story of Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla." While not as in depth as "Empire," Schewe covers a little bit of everything with fascinating anecdotes about the evolution of the grid.

Serendipity rules also, I had just finished reading the riveting "Lights Out" by T.S. Wiley detailing how the advent of electricity was responsible for our general decline in health. Primarily by distancing us from the natural rhythms of light that from time immemorial had ruled our lives. These three books together did more to promote my understanding of how the world works than thirty years of my constant immersion in the literary and non-fiction world.

As a bonus, not only is Schewe a particle physicist, but he's also a dramatist whose command of language, whose ability to search out the perfect simile or analogy to bring to life the arcane world of "The Grid," charmed the pants off of me. His reverence for his subject and for what our greedy demands for electricity are doing to the environment brought tears to my eyes. Ignore the bad reviews, this is is a great book.