Modernity wouldn't exist without Nikola Tesla. The Serbo-Croatian scientist invented the alternating-current motor, the basis for the electrical grids that power the world. A romantic, troubled figure, he cast a strange, beguiling shadow over everyone he met, walking through fields of electricity or spouting visionary ideas about transmitting thoughts and dreams via electromagnetic waves. It's no surprise, then, that he's been championed as a mad genius capable of anything.
Vladimir Pistalo's Tesla: A Portrait with Masks (the first of the Serbian writer's works to be translated into English) manages to convey that romanticism without ever getting lost in it. Nominally a novel, the book is more of a biography with some literary flights of fancy. Pistalo faithfully tracks Tesla's youth in modern-day Croatia, his time as a prodigious inventor and man about town in New York City, and his final days as a strange, antiquated figure. Instead of conjecture, Tesla re-creates dreams and conversations as if Tesla were a fictional character (which, by all accounts, was similar to how he acted). But even with the words "a novel" on the front cover, it's hard to avoid reading this book as true to life. Pistalo renders Tesla and his contemporaries so vividly that the line between fact and the author's imaginative powers begins to blend. The novel is perfect for readers looking for better insight into one of the greatest minds of the 19th and early 20th centuries. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.