Right off the bat, I need to say that this is a book that I have been wanting to read for ages, I've been so looking forward to it, and when I did finally get it from the library, I read it in four hours. And it's really long! Yes, I read quickly, but this was one of those books that I couldn't put down.
Charlotte Gray decided that the existing body of Alexander Graham Bell biographies was lacking (there are already quite a few), and so she decided to write one that took into account the special relationship that he had with his wife, Mabel. Gray is a thorough researcher and a great writer, and her biography is a treat. She spent extensive time at the family archives in Baddeck, NS (about five hours from here), where the Bells spent every summer for many years at their summer mansion, and she created a fascinating and incredibly appealing portrait of Bell and his family.
Alexander Graham Bell was a bit of a strange man; he was excitable, eccentric, a little obsessive-compulsive, full of big ideas, but unable to transition them to the world of patents and commercial usefulness. His wife, on the other hand, was steady, sturdy, organized, and very much in love with her husband. She was also deaf, and met Bell when he was a teacher for the hearing impaired (a passion that he had for his whole life, which I didn't know. But that's the point of reading biographies!) She kept him from becoming a crazy hermit and helped him to be the successful man the he was, and he helped her to live completely in the hearing world and not be marginalized as a lot of deaf people were at the time; in fact, she never learned any form of sign language, but functioned solely by lip reading.
The mixture in Gray's biography of Alexander Graham Bell as a family man and a husband and also as a scientist is fascinating. You feel like you learn a lot about both Bell as a scientist and as a person, which I think is the perfect balance. I really enjoyed this book, and I loved that it was written by a Canadian and was largely about places that I've been and live near (Bell spent part of his early 20s in Brantford, ON, and considered Baddeck his true home.) More than that, I love that this book is enjoyable as it is informative. I'm going to have to find some more of Gray's biographies soon.
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