The visionary eccentrics and hardboiled businessmen behind television’s inception come to life in this “gripping” (Booklist), “lucid and engrossing” (american Scientist) chronicle of patent races, marketing showdowns, and courtroom battles. Index; photographs.
Marshall Jon Fisher was born in 1963 in Ithaca, New York, grew up in Miami, and graduated from Brandeis University, where he played varsity tennis. He worked as a sportswriter in Miami and a tennis pro in Munich before moving to New York City, where he received an M.A. in English at City College. In 1989 he moved to Boston and began working as a freelance writer and editor.
He has written on a variety of topics for The Atlantic Monthly, ranging from wooden tennis rackets to Internet fraud, and his work has also appeared in Harper's, Discover, DoubleTake, and other publications, as well as The Best American Essays 2003. His book "The Ozone Layer" was selected by The New York Public Library as one of the best books for teenagers of 1993. His book (with his father, David E. Fisher) "Tube: the Invention of Television" was published by Counterpoint in 1996 and by Harcourt Brace in paperback in 1997. Their second book together, "Strangers in the Night: a Brief History of Life on Other Worlds" (Counterpoint 1998), was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the twenty-five Books to Remember of 1998.
In 2009, "A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, A World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played" was published to great acclaim. The Washington Times called it "a fine book...solidly researched.... Marshall Jon Fisher has found a remarkable story and has told it well." The Wall Street Journal termed it "rich and rewarding," and The San Francisco Chronicle called it "enthralling...a gripping tale.... Fisher pulls the task off with supreme finesse, at once revealing the triumph and tragedy of a remarkable tennis match." You can read more about the author and the book at marshalljonfisher.com.
Marshall lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts with his wife, Mileta Roe (a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock), and their two sons, Satchel and Bram.
