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Product Details
Paperback: 544 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; New Ed edition (October 1, 1999)
I purchased a copy for my boyfriend for Christmas and he loved it. He works at a successful tech start-up (now a major corporation) and he is into entrepreneurial, technology and innovation things. He likes books that are popular with techies age 25-45. If you enjoy books about Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, etc., this is a book you will enjoy. This is the definitive biography of Edwin Land and Polaroid, the best of all the biographies out there. Full disclosure, one of my relatives worked with Edwin Land very closely (and is featured inside this and other books about Polaroid), so our family also appreciate how accurate the book was in describing all the key players in the Polaroid story.
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Edwin Land must have been quite a person, who didn't turn into a railroad robber baron. The book is written on several levels. If you are of a scientific bent, this book will reward you. If you just want to know the history it will deliver it, but will swamp you a little with the technical details. The sense of pulling back the curtain on OZ is here without the tabloid view. It was nice to get my memories straight too. I have seen the sepia print photos as well as growing up when black & white and later color instant photos came into existence. As an adult I owned and still have a Spectra system camera. I remember the Kodiak TV ads for their instamatic cameras. I was sadden to read how this once great company lost it's vision and visonary and was finally driven into extinction by profit-only people.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful
This book contains the most detailed information I have seen assembled in one volume about the life of Dr. Edwin "Din" Land, founder of Polaroid Corporation. Although I long have read public accounts of Dr. Land's work, this book greatly added to my knowledge. For those who would like to understand the rise and fall of Polaroid and its stock price over several decades from 1937 through 1980, this book makes fascinating reading about some of the do's and don't's of running a high technology company that depends on developing new technologies and an on-going stream of innovative products. If you want to understand the techniques employed by Dr. Land to make scientific breakthroughs, there are many insights here into his method of goal-oriented empiricism. Interestingly, it parallels the approaches used by Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor of the 20th century. Unfortunately, Dr. Land left little in the way of writings to draw on other than patent applications and speeches, so these insights are limited primarily to recollections by colleagues. On the other hand, the empirical approach is often guided by instinct based on experience, which is hard to capture. Most scientific thinkers dislike empiricism, so those who use this method can expect many rebukes . . . as Dr. Land received in his work on the nature of color perception. Those who want to understand the scientific breakthroughs that Polaroid made will probably come away confused unless they already have a great knowledge of optics and chemistry related to photography. I learned a great deal from the book, but would have liked to learn more. I graded the book down one star for this weakness.Read more ›
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
I rarely write a review before I have completed a text, but am 250 pages into this book and wanted to warn as many others as possible. This book is clearly the weakest of the Sloan Technology Series to date for a number of reasons. The author frequently delves into ridiculous levels of detail about trivial events, and then glazes over larger technical issues. There is no in depth explanation of the chemical and physical explanations which enabled Land to develop Polaroid into a successful company. There is no rhyme or reason to the flow of the text, and it appears largely to follow the thought stream of the notes that the author used to put the text together. There is almost no quality treatment of the business aspects of Polaroid, the author making passing references when it so suits him. This is a very thick book, which is quite laborious to read. Unfortunately, the thickness does not translate into quality, or even quantity, of useful information located within.
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This item: Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land
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