Contemporary Authors

• The Power Makers: The Inside Story of America's Biggest Business—and Its Struggle to Control Tomorrow's Electricity Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1985
• America's Cup, 1987 Vanguard Press (Washington, DC), 1986
• The Energy Switch: Alternatives to Nuclear Power: A Report by the Union of Concerned Scientists Union (Cambridge, MA), 1987
• Cousteau, the Captain and His World W. Morrow (New York, NY), 1989
• The Cardinals of Capitol Hill: The Men and Women Who Control Government Spending Grove Press (New York, NY), 1993
• From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity Praeger (Westport, CT), 2005
• Tesla: Inventor of the Modern W.W. Norton & Company (New York, NY), 2018

1. Tesla : inventor of the modern LCCN 2017055596 Type of material Book Personal name Munson, Richard, author. Main title Tesla : inventor of the modern / Richard Munson. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2018] Projected pub date 1805 Description pages cm ISBN 9780393635447 (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. From Edison to Enron : the business of power and what it means for the future of electricity LCCN 2005017480 Type of material Book Personal name Munson, Richard. Main title From Edison to Enron : the business of power and what it means for the future of electricity / Richard Munson. Published/Created Westport, Conn. : Praeger Publishers, 2005. Description 206 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 027598740X (hc : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0514/2005017480.html CALL NUMBER HD9685.U5 M858 2005 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HD9685.U5 M858 2005 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. The cardinals of Capitol Hill : the men and women who control government spending LCCN 92043854 Type of material Book Personal name Munson, Richard. Main title The cardinals of Capitol Hill : the men and women who control government spending / Richard Munson. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Grove Press, 1993. Description xii, 222 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0802114601 : CALL NUMBER JK1430.A72 M86 1993 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER JK1430.A72 M86 1993 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER JK1430.A72 M86 1993 Copy 3 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 4. Cousteau, the captain and his world LCCN 89033842 Type of material Book Personal name Munson, Richard. Main title Cousteau, the captain and his world / Richard Munson. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : W. Morrow, c1989. Description 316 p., [12] p. of plates : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0688074502 CALL NUMBER GC30.C68 M86 1989 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. The energy switch : alternatives to nuclear power : a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists LCCN 89135952 Type of material Book Personal name Munson, Richard. Main title The energy switch : alternatives to nuclear power : a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists / Richard Munson. Published/Created Cambridge, Mass. : The Union, c1987. Description vi, 65 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0938987070 CALL NUMBER TJ163.25.U6 M863 1987 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 6. The power makers : the inside story of America's biggest business-- and its struggle to control tomorrow's electricity LCCN 85008243 Type of material Book Personal name Munson, Richard. Main title The power makers : the inside story of America's biggest business-- and its struggle to control tomorrow's electricity / by Richard Munson. Published/Created Emmaus, Pa. : Rodale Press, c1985. Description xi, 260 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0878575502 : CALL NUMBER HD9685.U5 M86 1985 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HD9685.U5 M86 1985 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 7. America's Cup, 1987 LCCN 86051425 Type of material Book Personal name Munson, Richard. Main title America's Cup, 1987 / Richard Munson. Published/Created Washington, D.C. : Vanguard Press, c1986. Description 147 p., [10] p. of plates : ill. ; 23 cm. Shelf Location FLM2015 151192 CALL NUMBER GV830 1987 .M86 1986 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 Questions? Ask a Librarian: https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus.html

• George Fabyan: The Tycoon Who Broke Ciphers, Ended Wars, Manipulated Sound, Built a Levitation Machine, and Organized the Modern Research Center - 2013 CreateSpace,

• Richard Munson Home Page - http://www.richardmunson.com/3401.html

  Dick Munson is the author of six books, most recently Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, a comprehensive portrait of the farsighted and underappreciated mastermind Nikola Tesla. George Fabyan, a biography of the Gilded-Age tycoon who broke ciphers, ended wars, manipulated sound, built a levitation machine, and organized the modern research center. Dick's From Edison to Enron recounts the history of electricity and suggests an innovation-based vision for the power industry. Cardinals of Capitol Hill traces the machinations of congressional appropriators who control government spending, and Cousteau: The Captain and His World examines the ocean explorer and filmmaker.

  Dick has worked in the private sector, on Capitol Hill, and with non-profit organizations in order to advance clean energy and environmental protection. He has been senior vice president at Recycled Energy Development (RED), a Chicago-based firm that seeks to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by advancing efficiency and capturing and recycling waste energy. In Washington, D.C., he directed the Northeast-Midwest Institute and coordinated with the Northeast-Midwest Congressional and Senate Coalitions, bipartisan caucuses that conducted policy research and drafted legislation on agriculture, economic development, brownfields redevelopment, energy, environmental, water quality, and manufacturing issues. The Coalitions supported the Great Lakes Task Forces and Manufacturing Task Forces of the United States Senate and House of Representatives.

  Dick also has served as executive director of the Solar Lobby, executive director of the Center for Renewable Resources, co-coordinator of Sun Day (an international celebration of alternative energy), coordinator of the Environmental Action Foundation, and lecturer in history at the University of Michigan.

  Dick has received outstanding service awards from the Great Lakes Commission, U.S. Clean Heat and Power Association, and American Small Manufacturers Coalition. He now sits on the boards of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, Center for Neighborhood Technology, Institute for Health Policy Solutions, and Greenleaf Advisors.

• Gotham Center - https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/to-harness-the-forces-of-nature-to-the-service-of-mankind-an-interview-with-richard-munson

  QUOTED: "Like many people, I long knew a bit about Tesla, was fascinated, and wanted to learn more. What surprised me was that the scientist was more than, as one biographer put it, “a Supernova in the galaxy of the human race.” No doubt electric motors, robots, remote control, and radio are rather super accomplishments, but this inventor also was human, charmingly so. Although most happy when he worked alone in his laboratory, Tesla enjoyed friends and could be an engaging conversationalist."

  "To harness the forces of nature to the service of mankind”: An interview with Richard Munson
  6/14/2018 0 Comments

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  Today on Gotham, we speak with Richard Munson, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s clean-energy efforts in the Midwest and the author of several books, including From Edison to Enron, about his new work, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern.
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  Ask ordinary people to name a famous inventor, and you'll hear 'Thomas Edison' more likely than 'Nikola Tesla,' although he foresaw everything which defines our world technologically, you say: cell phones, radar, laser weapons, artificial intelligence, the Internet, fax machines, vertical-life airplanes. You quote a person speaking before the nation's largest group of engineers, claiming by 1917 already that if not for him, "the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle." Was he forgotten?

  Tesla never was forgotten, but I argue he is underappreciated. Tesla won the War of the Currents and invented the electric motor and long-distance power transmission, but Edison is the more famous. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tesla’s patents were the first to describe radio transmissions, but Marconi is better known. In part that disconnect results from Edison developing products — such as the lightbulb and the phonograph — ​that consumers can touch and understand, while Tesla’s inventions — such as alternating current — serve as the foundation of our economy but are not readily apparent.

  What prompted you to write about Tesla? And did you learn anything surprising in the process? What do we get right or wrong about him?

  Like many people, I long knew a bit about Tesla, was fascinated, and wanted to learn more. What surprised me was that the scientist was more than, as one biographer put it, “a Supernova in the galaxy of the human race.” No doubt electric motors, robots, remote control, and radio are rather super accomplishments, but this inventor also was human, charmingly so. Although most happy when he worked alone in his laboratory, Tesla enjoyed friends and could be an engaging conversationalist. According to one journalist: “Tesla’s bright eyes glowed as he spoke of his work. He’s a talker from whose train of reasoning there was no escape while a man was under his influence.”

  Edison's closest adviser invites him to New York City, but he doesn't have a good first impression. Why? And what makes him stay? Could Tesla have made it anywhere else?

  A cultured European, Tesla arrived at Castle Clinton, the gloomy former fort that preceded Ellis Island, and found New York City in the 1880s to be cluttered and lacking in elegance, yet he quickly appreciated its economic opportunities. The metropolis presented a thriving mix of immigrants, entrepreneurs, and financiers, making it the hub of inventing.

  What separates Edison and Tesla in the "War of the Currents"?

  Ostensibly the war resulted from a technical disagreement over whether electricity should be transmitted via direct current or alternating current, but it also reflected different views about electricity’s future. Edison tended to think power would remain a luxury item enjoyed by those, such as J.P. Morgan, who could afford small generators in their homes. Tesla’s vision was more democratic, with centralized power plants sending electricity to far-flung communities, which could then only be done with alternating current (AC). The “war” became gruesome when Edison, trying to defend his investments in direct-current equipment, caused several animals to be electrocuted by high-voltage alternating current. In partnership with George Westinghouse, of course, Tesla demonstrated AC to be the superior technology.

  What are Tesla’s major turning points in New York City?

  Tesla arrived in Manhattan with only four cents in his pocket. He earned a decent wage from Thomas Edison, but left after the Wizard of Menlo Park failed to pay a promised bonus for Tesla tripling the output of a dynamo. Tesla started his own company, but his investors cheated him, and the inventor spent a year digging ditches, earning only $2 per day. When Tesla finally sold his electric motor patents to George Westinghouse, however, he moved into the Waldorf-Astoria and started eating meals at Delmonico’s. Towards the end of his life, when his major investment in the wireless transmission of power did not pan out, he declared bankruptcy and lived alone, often surrounded by pigeons, at the Hotel New Yorker.

  Does the work continue? And how is NYC different for a person in his field now?

  Tesla offers an example of curiosity-seeking, idealistic inventing. Today’s innovations tend to be done by teams at federal labs, universities, or corporate research centers, and they usually are focused on profit. Even Edison developed new products in order to make money, while Tesla — although he certainly enjoyed his lavish meals at Delmonico’s and his fancy room at the Waldorf Astoria — believed that technology transcended the marketplace and that invention should not just be tied to profits. He wrote: “The desire that guides me in all I do is the desire to harness the forces of nature to the service of mankind.” In my opinion, NYC and other communities need to embrace Tesla’s example of selfless, out-of-the-box thinking if we are to tackle climate change, pervasive poverty, and other worldly challenges.

  No doubt Tesla aimed high, perhaps higher than any other inventor. He worked tirelessly to offer electric power freely to the world and to build robots that would reduce life’s drudgery. He demonstrated that creation can be the most important thing in one’s life. And we are the better for it.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Munson

  Richard Munson
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  Richard (Dick) Munson is an American author and clean energy advocate. His latest book, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, was published by W.W. Norton in May 2018. Author of five other books with topics that range from U.S. government energy policy to profiles of tycoon George Fabyan and oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, Munson is also Director of Midwest Clean Energy for the Environmental Defense Fund,[1] working primarily as a lobbyist for clean energy initiatives in Illinois and Ohio.

  Contents
  1 Early life and education
  2 Career
  3 Published works
  4 Bibliography
  5 Publications
  6 References
  7 External links
  Early life and education
  Born and raised in Southern California, Munson earned a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. from the University of Michigan. He lived in Michigan and Washington, D.C., before moving to Chicago, where he is now based.

  Munson was first inspired to battle pollution in college, when in early 1969 an oil spill in Santa Barbara, California, blackened beaches, killing thousands of sea birds and other marine life.[2]

  Career
  Munson is the Midwest Director of Clean Energy for the Environmental Defense Fund, a global organization whose mission “is to preserve the natural systems on which all life depends.”[3] EDF works in conjunction with business, government and communities to solve environmental problems affecting climate, ecosystems, oceans and health. Previously, Munson was senior vice president of Recycled Energy Development (RED), an Illinois-based industrial waste-to-energy company.

  He was also executive director of the Northeast-Midwest Institute and coordinated with the Northeast-Midwest House and Senate Coalitions,[4] bipartisan caucuses that conduct policy research and draft legislation on issues pertaining to agriculture, economic development, energy, the environment, and manufacturing. Other clean energy and environmental groups he has held leadership positions with include the Center for Renewable Resources, Solar Lobby, Sun Day, and the Environmental Action Foundation.

  Munson currently sits on the boards of Elevate Energy,[5] Center for Neighborhood Technology,[6] Illinois Environment Council[7] and Greenleaf Advisors.[8]

  Munson is frequently cited in media[9][10] and serves on panels as an authority on energy policy and electricity markets.[11] He has received public service awards from the Great Lakes Commission, American Small Manufacturers Coalition and the U.S. Clean Heat and Power Association.

  Published works
  Munson’s latest book, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern (W.W. Norton, May 2018), follows Nikola Tesla from his childhood in Eastern Europe to the United States, working for titans Edison and Westinghouse and exploring the frontier of electrical transmission, to dying alone in a New York hotel. Munson draws on Tesla’s letters, technical notebooks, and other primary sources to piece together the personal life and habits of the enigmatic inventor. A Kirkus starred review calls Tesla: Inventor of the Modern “A lucid, expertly researched biography,” and affirms that readers “will absolutely enjoy his sympathetic, insightful portrait.” Booklist says it is a “celebratory, comprehensive profile . . . A well-written, insightful addition to the legacy of this still-underappreciated visionary genius.”

  Munson’s first book, The Power Makers, was hailed as “a sober and thoughtful analysis of the troubled electricity business” by Washington Monthly,[12] and ranked by them as one of the best political books of the year.

  Bibliography
  Tesla: Inventor of the Modern. W.W. Norton, 2018. ISBN 978-0393635447
  George Fabyan: The Tycoon Who Broke Ciphers, Ended Wars, Manipulated Sound, Built a Levitation Machine, and Organized the Modern Research Center. CreateSpace, 2013. ISBN 978-1490345628
  From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity. Praeger, 2005. ISBN 978-0275987404
  The Cardinals of Capitol Hill: The Men and Women Who Control Government Spending. Grove,1993. ISBN 978-0802114600
  Cousteau: The Captain and His World. William Morrow & Co, 1989. ISBN 978-0688074500
  The Power Makers: The Inside Story of America's Biggest Business and Its Struggle to Control Tomorrow's Electricity. Rodale, 1985. ISBN 978-0878575503
  Publications
  “This Cleantech Hotspot Is Giving New York and California a Run for Their Money,” The Fourth Wave, April 12, 2018. Accessed May 12, 2018. https://medium.com/the-fourth-wave/this-cleantech-hotspot-is-giving-new-york-and-california-a-run-for-their-money-3a825cafc3f4

  “Trump May Greenlight An $8 Billion Attack On Competitive Energy Markets,” Forbes, April 11, 2018. Accessed May 12, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/edfenergyexchange/2018/04/11/trump-may-greenlight-an-8-billion-attack-on-competitive-energy-markets/#790adc2e33d8

  “Taxpayers shouldn’t foot the $8 billion bill to bail out a failing energy company,” The Hill, April 7, 2018. Accessed May 12, 2018. http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/382087-taxpayers-shouldnt-foot-the-8-billion-bill-to-bailout-a-failing

  “Could Blockchain Soon Upend America’s Power Markets?” The Fourth Wave, April 4, 2018. Accessed April 12, 2018. https://medium.com/the-fourth-wave/could-blockchain-soon-upend-americas-power-markets-d0dcb8f77479

  “FirstEnergy lobbying seeks to thwart the public's interest in lower electricity rates,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 7, 2018 Accessed May 12, 2018. http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2018/03/firstenergys_lobbying_sought_t.html

  “To fight climate change, we must change our vocabulary,” Energy News Network, January 4, 2018. Accessed May 12, 2018. https://energynews.us/2018/01/04/midwest/commentary-to-fight-climate-change-we-must-change-our-vocabulary/

  “Will Ohio turn its back on electricity competition?” Columbus Dispatch, December 6, 2017. Accessed May 12, 2018. http://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20171206/dick-munson-will-ohio-turn-its-back-on-electricity-competition

  “New clean energy law gives Illinois a chance to show national leadership,” Daily Herald, June 19, 2017. Accessed May 12, 2018. http://www.dailyherald.com/discuss/20170619/new-clean-energy-law-gives-illinois-a-chance-to-show-national-leadership

  “As Trump threatens historic climate protections, Midwest Republican governors embrace clean energy economy,” Energy News Network, March 24, 2017. Accessed May 12, 2018. https://energynews.us/2017/03/24/midwest/commentary-as-trump-threatens-historic-climate-protections-midwest-republican-governors-embrace-clean-energy-economy/

  “Regulatory Wonderland,” The Fourth Wave, April 6, 2016. Accessed May 12, 2018. https://medium.com/@dickmunson/regulatory-wonderland-43a382005755

  “As Utilities Embrace Change, FirstEnergy’s Strategy Is Resistance and Protectionism.” Greentech Media, August 21, 2015. Accessed May 12, 2018. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/as-utilities-embrace-change-firstenergys-strategy-is-resistance-and-protect#gs.Q7GXuLY

QUOTED: "Richard Munson's The Power Makers is a sober and thoughtful analysis of the troubled electricity business. The book has the virtue of being more fair-minded than what some might expect from a former executive director of the Solar Lobby. Munson's style is not elegant, but that is a small complaint. He also makes his account more interesting by devoting considerable space to a lively history of the electric utility industry that sheds light on how the industry reached the current crisis."

The power makers: the inside story of America's biggest business and its struggle to control tomorrow's electricity
Philip Keisling
Washington Monthly. 17 (Dec. 1985): p42+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1985 Washington Monthly Company
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Full Text:
The Power Markers

The nation's electric utility companies are the great icebergs of the American economy. Their vast, largely submerged bulk eludes the attention of the public. Last year, electric utilities accounted for one-half of all new common stock issued in America and one-third of all new corporate financing. Annually, the utilities spend four times more on new equipment than all U.S. automakers. The industry has a long-term debt of $100 billion, on which annual interest payments, passed on to ratepayers, exceed $10 billion.

The danger posed by these icebergs is reflected in some different numbers. The nation's utilities are currently awash in excess power, having gone on a construction binge in the last two decades that has left them with 40 percent more capacity than needed to meet current demand. This is dispite the industry's abandonment, since 1973, of more than 150 unfinished nuclear-and coal-powered plants.

One consequence of this colossal economic miscalculation is that monthly utility bills for the typical consumer have tripled since 1973. More rate shocks lie ahead. For example, customers of the Public Service Company of New Hampshire, owners of the troubled Seabrook nuclear power plant, soon will see their bills leap 182 percent when the $4.5 billion plant is finally completed.

If this suggests the wisdom of refraining from further construction, you'd never know it from the multimillion-dollar advertising campaign the utilities are now waging under the auspices of the Edison Electric Institute. The ubiquitous ads warn of devastating power shortages in the near future unless Americans face up to the challenge at hand. According to industry planners, that challenge demands the building of 438 large central generating stations in the next 15 years. That's almost two new plants a month, at a total cost of $1.8 trillion.

Such a lopsided use of the nation's limited pool of investment capital might be palatable if the industry's premise that more electricity use equals more progress were true. Experience and logic, however, suggest just the opposite. What happened to the consumption of another key source of energy--oil--during the 1970s? As its price rose tenfold, consumption plummeted. Consumers found countless ways to conserve, and the government put a healthy dent in oil consumption by mandating fuel-efficient automobiles. While two OPEC price shocks clearly damaged our economy, they did not destroy it; real economic growth during the 1970s still was greater than during the 1950s.

What's happening now with electricity is similar to what happened with oil. It's also something any Economics 101 student could have predicted. As prices have spiraled upwards, consumers have moderated or even reduced their demand. The specialty steel and aluminum industries, for example, have discovered that investing in modern equipment that lowers electricity costs is one of the best strategies for survival in a competitive market. As for the electricity-equals-progress equation, less of the former often means more of the latter. Modern microchip computers are an excellent example. Less expensive, more compact, and far more capable than their transistorized ancestors, these computers also use far less electricity.

There is nothing sacred in a perpetually climbing demand curve for any commodity. Yet for utility executives who have based their multi-billion-dollar construction programs on the inviolate truth of such a curve, doubting its validity is a bit like asking an archbishop to question the existence of God. It's unpleasant enough having to explain to irate ratepayers that, yes, rates are going up, and yes, it's largely to pay for an abandoned nuclear plant that will never produce a watt of power. People caught in such a position understandably would prefer to believe that somehow, someday, the dire shortage will come and that once ungrateful customers will suddenly recognize them for having been lonely prohets without honor.

This helps explain the ads, which are nothing more than an effort in the age-old game of self-fulfilling prophesy. And even if electricity demand does continue to rise, the industry has a second, even more terrifying, nightmare: a dramatic change in how consumers get their power.

For example, a single technological break-through in photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight directly to electricity, could allow customers to bypass utilities entirely for most, if not all, of their power needs. Imagine what would happen if homeowners could purchase photovoltaic cells at their local Pay and Pak and install them on their roofs. Consolidated Edison might soon go the way of the iceman in the age of the refrigerator.

Public insulation

Richard Munson's The Power Makers* is a sober and thoughtful analysis of the troubled electricity business. The book has the virtue of being more fair-minded than what some might expect from a former executive director of the Solar Lobby. Munson's style is not elegant, but that is a small complaint. He also makes his account more interesting by devoting considerable space to a lively history of the electric utility industry that sheds light on how the industry reached the current crisis.

* The Power Makers: The Inside Story of America's Biggest Business and Its Struggle to Control Tomorrow's Electricity. Richard Munson. Rodale Press, $16.95.

One of the main characters in that saga was Samuel Insull, a onetime assistant to Thomas Edison, who began building a utility empire in Chicago in 1892. At that time, the industry was characterized by the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that would send a George Gilder into raptures. The result, however, was not efficiency, but waste and high prices. Most companies had their own generating stations, which seldom operated at full capacity and frequently offered different kinds of power. Appliances set to operate on 40 cycles of electric current became useless if the owner moved across the street to a house serviced by 126 cycles. Insull's lasting contribution to the industry was to propose a deal: in exchange for receiving a monopoly to provide electricity that would be more efficiently generated and thus cheaper, he would submit to public regulation. This model became so successful that by the mid-1920s, Insull ruled an empire of utilities that stretched across the Midwest.

In one of the most spectacular failures in the history of American capitalism, Insull's great edifice collapsed during the Depression. The folding of his enterprise became a major issue in the 1932 presidential campaign. Herbert Hoover embraced Insull's model of private ownership and public regulation. FDR championed the public ownership of utilities as he had during his years as governor of New York, and he often attacked Insull as the epitome of capitalism run amok.

Within a month of his inauguration, Roosevelt made good on his promise to create a Tennessee Valley Authority. Many--especially executives of private utilities--saw the TVA as the beginning of the end for private power. Large public power projects meant cheaper electricity: the TVA's rate was half that of private utilities in the region. And if the eventual goal was a unified, national power grid, it made sense to many that such a vast network be publicly regulated and publicly owned, much like the nation's highway system.

The private utility industry didn't give up without a fight. The distractions provided by World War II and the Cold War helped its cause, as did such obscure figures as George Vennard, an engineer-turned-advertising director for the electric utility industry. Through marketing surveys, Vennard learned that "government-owned' had a far more sinister ring than "public utility,' and that "investor-owned' sounded a great deal more attractive than "private power.' He wrote ads accordingly. One that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post showed a proud father and his two children. "Sure I used to think it wouldn't do any harm to have the government run the electric business,' the man says, "but I've changed my mind. Because when government meddles too much in any business, you get socialism.'

Of course, it was not advertising that saved private utilities from nationalization. Technological advances and economies of scale were conspiring to make electricity prices drop steadily. And while the industry promoted the "all-electric home' as the ultimate symbol of modern living, utility executives busied themselves with plans for the small army of new plants necessary to meet the demand they were helping to fuel.

In retrospect, it appears the industry was setting a trap for itself that would spring shut during the 1970s with the utilities' headlong rush into nuclear power. Engineering and safety problems led to unexpected delays, interest rates rose, and utilities became the target of critics who wanted to halt the building of new plants. For the first time in decades, adding new plants to the power grid did not cause rates to fall. Now rates had to increase--a lot. And as rates increased, demand decreased. With the utilities passing more and more costs to the consumer, demand declined further, forcing a new round of rate hikes. This vicious circle--far more than environmentalists, government regulators, or Three Mile Island-- has brought America's nuclear industry to its knees and put electric utilities in difficult straits.

To his credit, Munson does not dwell on the oft-told tale of the nuclear industry's woes, nor does he think the obvious lesson is a return to public power. He wisely notes that the nation's most notorious nuclear debacle was caused by a public utility, the Washington Public Power Supply System, which has abandoned two plants, mothballed two more, and left behind $2.3 billion in defaulted bonds.

Munson instead attributes the industry's plight to its inflexibility. He also offers a sublime nugget of anthropological insight. For decades, Munson writes, the electric utility industry was considered the dumping ground for medicore executives, "who traditionally came from the bottom third of their engineering class and were protected from competition by regulatory bureaucracies.' These executives were scorned by others in the private sector, who saw them as "unimaginative laggards,' incapable of hacking it anywhere else. Accordingly, many utility executives saw a multi-billion-dollar construction program as a chance to prove their prowess as true captains of industry.

Hindsight, of course, is easy. Unnecessary plants were built, and somehow will be paid for. The appropriate question is where the electric utility industry goes from here.

Munson identifies two major strategies for the future. The first is familiar: greater reliance on "alternative technology.' There's nothing new here, though Munson does understand that not all alternative technologies make economic sense. He also demonstrates that there are alternative technologies that make more economic sense than large nuclear power plants, which typically take ten years to complete and are difficult to abandon if circumstances suddenly change. If electricity demand is volatile in an era of rising prices, Munson argues, it is far better to rely on conservation and large numbers of smaller generating facilities. Thus, if demand suddenly falls, the system has the flexibility to adapt.

Munson's second strategy is further deregulation of the electricity industry. He argues that the arrangement pioneered by Insull--a guaranteed market for a utility's power in exchange for publicly regulated rates--no longer makes sense. To encourage cheaper, more flexible alternatives to large generating plants, there should be more competition in the electricity marketplace.

As an example of the potential, Munson points to California, where "energy entrepreneurs' sell power to the state's utilities, using cogeneration (a process that uses fossil fuels to produce both heat and electricity); small dams; windmills; solar energy; and even the incineration of garbage. Under a little-known law enacted during the Carter administration, the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), state regulators determine the price private utilities in California and elsewhere must pay for such power. California also allows independent producers to sell directly to large industrial customers, bypassing utilities entirely. In a few years, Munson notes, such independent producers will provide 25 percent of the state's electric capacity.

Munson urges even more deregulation. California's lead in letting independent producers sell directly to large customers should be followed on a national scale, he says. PURPA should be expanded to require public projects, such as the TVA, to purchase independently produced power. Private utilities should also be forced to relinquish their stranglehold on their portions of the nation's power grid, which includes 600,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. If state regulators could require these utilities to "wheel' (transmit and distribute) other utilities' power, customers in high-rate areas could buy cheaper power from areas that happen to have surpluses.

No blind enthusiast for the free market, Munson recognizes that public regulation of utilities is still vital to address concerns such as safety, which private businesses are prone to ignore. If a private producer should go bankrupt-- an occupational hazard in any deregulated market--consumers need assurance of minimum disruptions in service. There is also a danger, Munson notes, that the main beneficiaries of competition will be large, commercial customers, whose size gives them considerable clout in the marketplace. Experience in the recently deregulated telephone and airline industries illustrates this latter problem. Businessmen plying the Los Angeles-to-New York trade in both cases have fared far better than the Aunt Millies who want to visit their Sister Pearls in Dubuque or talk on the phone with their Cousin Selmas across town.

Indeed, Munson cites the AT&T breakup as an example of deregulation that came too fast and with too much disruption. He urges that deregulation of the electric utilities industry proceed more gradually and that it be confined largely to producing power. Responsibility for transmitting and distributing that power should remain in the hands of regulated utilities.

Needless to say, the partial deregulation of this industry has not been greeted with wild enthusiasm by utility executives, especially those struggling to peddle expensive, excess power. A more puzzling reluctance can be found among those whom one might expect to embrace deregulation with open arms: conservatives. The Reagan administration has not taken a clear stand on this question, doubtless realizing that further deregulation might well seal the fate of the moribund nuclear power industry.

The machinations of Senator Alfonse D'Amato are even more revealing of a certain double standard on the right. D'Amato recently convinced his Senate colleagues to approve a government bailout for the embattled Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island. The bailout, which came in the form of making the Long Island Light Company eligible for government-subsidized industrial development bonds, will cost the U.S. Treasury about $500 million through 1989. After succeeding in making the bailout part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, D'Amato denounced the overall bill for its "total lack of spending curtailment.'

The ironies are glaring. Here are Republicans, championing an industry that is "private' in name but whose club-footedness and inflexibility reminds one of Soviet agricultural commissars working on their next five-year plan. Meanwhile, the nation's windmill operators, solar energy lobbyists, cogeneration enthusiasts, and others urge economic deregulation, using the arguments of Adam Smith. There is also a sizable political opportunity here waiting to be exploited, just as FDR did a half-century ago with public power. By promising to provide society with a basic commodity for a lot less money, further deregulation will free up billions in investment capital that can be channeled into such worthy causes as research and development, starting new businesses, and rebuilding our dilapidated infrastructure. Spending $1.8 trillion on those other purposes would do a lot more for economic growth than pouring it into more large power plants--especially ones that may never be turned on.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Keisling, Philip. "The power makers: the inside story of America's biggest business and its struggle to control tomorrow's electricity." Washington Monthly, Dec. 1985, p. 42+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A4041832/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=14d76a34. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A4041832

QUOTED: "Disguised as a history of electric power, this is another polemic for radical changes in the industry; in particular, the key is greater generation of electricity within the consuming facility. This is to be effected by adopting pet ideas for technical change that were old and uneconomic when advocated during the 1970s."
"Munson comes close to reasonable conclusions that regulation throttles competition in electric power, However, his exposition, not only fails satisfactorily to justify the case, but often contradicts it. The problems of electricity are treated often in anthologies with contributions with the many able specialists in the subject. Any one of these is more helpful than Munson."

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From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity
Richard L. Gordon
The Energy Journal. 28.2 (Apr. 2007): p175+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 International Association for Energy Economics
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/journal.aspx
Full Text:
From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity, by RICHARD MUNSON (Westport: Praeger, 2005) 206 pages, ISBN 0-275-98740-X.

Disguised as a history of electric power, this is another polemic for radical changes in the industry; in particular, the key is greater generation of electricity within the consuming facility. This is to be effected by adopting pet ideas for technical change that were old and uneconomic when advocated during the 1970s.

The stage-setting introductory chapter starts extolling the importance of electricity, notes that it is a huge industry, remarks on its lobbying activity, complains that it is "rickety," and foresees that a new breed of entrepreneurs is poised radically to transform the industry if the regulatory process is reformed.

The next six chapters give his version of industry history. Chapter 2 is "Early Competition," a quick examination of the roles of Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla in establishing the electric-power industry. This is an adequate summary of a much-studied subject. It is marred by an inexplicable stress on Edison's failings, particularly in personal hygiene.

Chapter 3, "Monopolists," however, badly treats the rise of large integrated electric-power operating companies, holding companies, and federal government involvement in electric power. The treatment pays excessive attention to Samuel Insull and shows misunderstanding. Insull is used as the archetype of the creators of both consolidated and integrated operating companies such as his Commonwealth Edison and the holding companies such as Insull's Middle West Utilities. The former choice is apt, but with holding companies, Munson neglects to discuss adequately either the soundness of Insull's effort or the existence of numerous other, more successful examples.

Concentration on Insull's ventures into a holding company leads to a skewed discussion of the subject. Munson's zeal to attack the holding-company movement aggravates the problem. Insull's was but one of several holding-company empires, and several others emerged unscathed from the Great Depression. The failures by Insull and others probably were due less to imprudence than to the rise of an unprecedentedly severe financial shock. As is standard in the literature on holding companies, Munson uncritically approves the government witch hunt. It is not recognized that the inquiry only found that the accounting erred towards optimism and shifting as much income as possible to unregulated parts of the operation. No Enron-style weak ventures were concealed; the solid operating companies were essentially valued on the assumption of continued prosperity.

The situation is not helped by carelessness about detail. Munson's discussion of the twenties is at best vague about which among J. P. Morgan the company and the two J.P. Morgans who headed it is being discussed. The first J.P. Morgan died in 1913, but his son, also J.P. Morgan, took over (and died in 1943). Munson illustrates his remark about anti-business muckraking in the 1920s by Tarbell's 1904 book about Standard Oil and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle from 1906. Similarly, 50 years after John McGee's classic reappraisal of Standard Oil, Munson (p. 55) talks of warfare by John D. Rockefeller. Wendell Wilkie, the 1940 Republican candidate for President who died in 1944, is called "the frequent Republican presidential candidate."

More fundamentally, his treatment of holding companies is unsatisfactory. His one-paragraph overview treats without note of the difference both other integrated operating companies and holding companies. His sample of such companies is unsatisfactory. Electric Bond and Share, probably the most important, is ignored. Munson goes a step further than prior writers in treating the United Corporation. The literature presents United Corporation as the biggest holding company of them all because of all the important eastern operating companies in which it held shares. However, many prior writers left tacit that United was not established until 1929, did not manage these companies, and quickly liquidated its holdings. Munson, however, describes United as managing these companies.

The last half of the chapter is an unsatisfactory treatment of government involvement in electric power that is totally different from what he argues in Chapter 9. Munson flits among investigations of private activities, defensive measures by private companies, federal-government power ventures, and the program to subsidize rural electrification. A key part of the discussion is review of the evolution from controversy over disposal of a nitrate plant and dam at Muscle Shoals, Alabama to the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He seems to view the process as a noble effort to devise a multi-purpose project. He does note in passing the eventual dominance of steam-electric generation in the Authority's activity conflicts with the earlier vision. He shows no sense that the initial concerns about giveaways and the later claims of multiple needs may have been unfounded. In Chapter 9, he turns Austrian, echoes previously derided private-utility complaints, and attacks public-power agencies and cooperatives as leading protectors of the status quo.

Among further problems is persistent confusion between accounting valuation and market value. Thus, the discussion of efforts of private interests to buy the dam and fertilizer plant accepts contentions that bids at a twentieth of book value constituted a giveaway rather than recognition that the government investment was imprudent. This shows no familiarity with the persistence of false claims by politicians of giveaways.

Chapter 4 then rushes through developments from the fifties to the eighties. This encompasses through short summaries the promotion of nuclear power, the 1965 blackout, an alleged hitting of an efficiency limit in 1967, the rise of environmentalism, the Otter Tail ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court about access to transmission, the misnamed oil embargo of 1973, Consolidated Edison's 1974 missed dividend, the Three Mile Island nuclear-plant accident, the Washington Public Power Supply System bond default, and government actions. The parts, particularly the treatment of Three Mile Island, overstate. These sketches by only reporting many problems of varying importance fail to delineate underlying deficiencies and how to deal with them. Munson's later discussions jump to solutions without showing why the historical record implies the reactions that he proposes.

Chapter 5 then is a much more satisfactory review of the passage (in 1978 and 1992) and implementation of legislation that tried to increase competition in electricity generation

The next chapter treats, again in brief and often overstated sections, stresses comprised by the Enron scandal, the California crisis, the 2003 blackout, and note of political responses.

Chapter 7 profiles an independent power producer whom Munson admires for advocacy of power plants at the consumption site.

Chapter 8 describes the "new" technologies Munson believes will move the industry into a sounder future. Stress is on technologies that usefully employ more of the energy. These are those usual ones of utilizing the waste heat from electricity generation for other needs such as for industrial processes or space heating (as Penn State has long done) and attaching a steam boilers to capture and utilize for electricity generation the waste heat of a combustion turbine. Munson throws in the other hearty perennials of more efficient lights and appliances, microturbines, wind, solar, fuel cells, biomass, coal gasification, new designs for nuclear plans, and improved storage and transmission technology.

Chapter 9 summarizes the resistance. The efforts of its power company to increase MIT's payments for backup to the power plant MIT was building and other anecdotes illustrate the barriers and how they are overcome. He then gives selective examples of how private utilities (or as he terms them, monopolies), public power (also termed monopolies and encompassing cooperatives), regulators, environmentalists, consumer organizations, modelers, and politicians oppose change. (As might be expected, the attack on modelers is gratuitous.) A key neglect here is that other private utilities vigorously advocated change because they wanted either to obtain or become independent power suppliers.

After praising the PJM pool as a model, he concludes with a list of barriers. The most important are those that in various ways thwart competition with existing utilities. He also too tersely notes the perversities of environmental regulations, particularly those that subject new plants to more stringent standards. These are basically solid conclusions. However, contrary to Munson's presumptions, the effect may only be on the identity of the supplier. The failure to adopt Munson's approach probably reflects unfavorable economics rather than defective vision. As noted, his proposals are essentially ones presented and proving uneconomic in the seventies.

Chapter 10 then presents his suggestions for the technological fixes and the institutional framework to utilize them. It turns out that, in fact, centralized generation is still needed and Munson's goal is increased reliance on new technology. He wants more competition. Instead of examining the extensive literature on electricity restructuring that the Energy Journal has reviewed, Munson notes a variety of competition-enhancing regulatory and privatization efforts in other industries.

Again, a dubious aside raises concerns. He notes that Warren Buffet claims that the Public Utility Holding Company Act limited his purchases of utilities beyond that of PacifiCorp. At a minimum, this ignores that the acquisition was by MidAmerica Energy Holdings, an Iowa Company previously acquired by Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. Beyond that, this was the latest of many allowed mergers that violated the Holding Company Act prohibition of joining noncontiguous utilities (e.g., that which Insull built in Chicago with that in Philadelphia). The Act was repealed in 2005, probably after Munson completed the book.

In short, Munson comes close to reasonable conclusions that regulation throttles competition in electric power, However, his exposition, not only fails satisfactorily to justify the case, but often contradicts it. The problems of electricity are treated often in anthologies with contributions with the many able specialists in the subject. Any one of these is more helpful than Munson.

Richard L. Gordon

The Pennsylvania State University

Gordon, Richard L.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gordon, Richard L. "From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity." The Energy Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 2007, p. 175+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A162520080/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=45f202ed. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A162520080

QUOTED: "The book's strength is in the detailed descriptions of several major political dramas, including the battle over space station Freedom and the fate of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's housing programs, especially Project HOPE. Munson eloquently captures the excitement and tension of political hardball, where no room exists for amateurs or the faint of heart."
"Munson's detailed and illuminating look at the appropriations process his central purpose is nothing other than superb. It should be required reading for students of government and for anyone trying to influence the legislative process."

The Cardinals of Capitol Hill: The Men and Women Who Control Government Spending
William G. Wells, Jr.
Issues in Science and Technology. 10.4 (Summer 1994): p75+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 National Academy of Sciences
http://www.issues.org
Full Text:
If Willy Sutton came to Capitol Hill today, his first stops would be the House and Senate appropriations committees because that's where the money is. Seats on these committees confer great power and are fought over fiercely. Especially coveted are the chairs of the two full committees and 26 subcommittees, a group collectively known as "the cardinals."

Although these committees, and especially their chairs, exert tremendous control over federal spending, the way they work and how they make their decisions have long been obscure. Even fights to win seats on the committees take place largely behind the scenes. In The Cardinals of Capitol Hill, Richard Munson pierces the veils of secrecy that have surrounded the appropriations committees and lays bare some, though hardly all, of their inner workings. The book is filled with lively descriptions and valuable insights, helped by the highly unusual access Munson was given to key committee members and staff, who provide many candid comments.

Munson was well-suited to the task of writing The Cardinals. Since 1987, he has directed the Northeast-Midwest Congressional Coalition, a group comprised of about 200 representatives and 36 senators from northern states. Previously, he was active in several energy and environmental lobbying organizations.

This background as well as Munson's highly professional approach to his task obviously helped open a lot of doors. This is no kiss-and-tell expose designed to titillate a media and public that feasts on congressional scandals and misdeeds. Although Munson includes some less-than-flattering descriptions of individuals and events, for the most part he rigorously sticks to describing what happened, who did what, when, and why.

Munson takes an approach used in other books about the workings of Congress: following a piece of legislation from start to finish and examining a committee in detail. But his is the first to provide a close-up look at two of the appropriations subcommittees: the Senate and House Veterans Administration, Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies Subcommittees, or VA-HUD for short.

The book follows the fiscal year 1992 appropriation activities of the two VA-HUD panels from Feb. 4, 1991, when President Bush submitted his budget to Congress, until Oct. 28, 1991, when the president quietly signed the VA-HUD appropriations bill into law, despite having threatened more than once to veto the measure. Munson vividly chronicles nearly nine months of frenetic activity, from the early analysis and allocations among the subcommittees to the hearings, markups of the bills, floor actions, and conference proceedings aimed at reconciling Senate-House differences.

Munson also places the VA-HUD process within the larger context of the full appropriations committees' activities and those of the Senate and House. The two VA-HUD chairs, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Rep. Bob Traxler (D-Mich.), and the two full committee chairs, Rep. Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.) and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), get top billing in Munson's book; other subcommittee chairs and some Republican members are noted only in passing. Munson's profiles of various staff members--particularly the House's Dick Malow and the Senate's Kevin Kelly, the clerks who head the VA-HUD staffs--are especially revealing about the status and power of these behind-the-scenes players.

Munson's minimal treatment of the other cardinals is one of the few weaknesses of his book. He fails to capture or even acknowledge the different styles, personalities, areas of coverage, and ways of working of the other cardinals. Thus, the title of the book is somewhat misleading.

The book's strength is in the detailed descriptions of several major political dramas, including the battle over space station Freedom and the fate of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's housing programs, especially Project HOPE. Munson eloquently captures the excitement and tension of political hardball, where no room exists for amateurs or the faint of heart.

The power of staff

Munson's book indirectly makes a succinct argument against term-limit proposals for members of Congress by vividly showing the difficulties faced by inexperienced politicians. Complicated and arcane congressional processes already make it tough even for experienced, knowledgeable ones. If term limits were imposed, staff in Congress would be even more powerful than they now are. The same might be said for executive branch professionals. If the term-limiters were really interested in curtailing what they see as undesirable vested power, they should be seeking limits for staff in Congress and in the agencies.

Indeed, a recurring theme in The Cardinals is the underlying power struggle between elected members and staff. Some members discuss this subject openly and bitterly; others resignedly accept their dependence on staff as a necessity. Says one staff member: "Here I am a simple staffer, and I'm constantly called by cabinet secretaries and agency directors. It's a heady experience, and I quickly learned that power increases as power is exerted." At one point, Munson shows a House clerk who heads a subcommittee staff facing down a senior senator at a conference meeting without even bothering to be polite. Some staff are more modest: A senior House clerk says his power is grounded in doing what the chairman wants done and in understanding the political limits of any proposal or action.

Munson clearly and accurately differentiates levels of staff influence, showing that, as is the case with members, not all staff are alike. The most powerful, of course, are the staff on the two full committees who, with their respective chair, divvy up the budget allocations to their 13 subcommittees. On the other hand, staffers in the offices of appropriations committee members can watch but not influence. There are exceptions but not many.

Although it is not thoroughly discussed, Munson effectively raises the issue of earmarking of expenditures by members to their home districts or states. Members of appropriations committees are, of course, ideally located to engage in earmarking. The level of pork-barrel spending has risen dramatically recently, and Congress itself is sharply divided over the practice. Munson treats the subject evenhandedly while revealing a fissure on the subject even among appropriations committee staff. For instance, he quotes one Senate staffer as saying that, "We used to discuss national priorities. Now we fear for our jobs if we don't add West Virginia projects or respond to the chairman's whims. It's not a healthy atmosphere." Munson responds to this by pointing out that "much that [Senator] Byrd promotes, of course, is not parochial. The chairman has fought hard for money to battle drugs, conduct biomedical research, and construct public works across the country."

Munson discusses the schism between appropriations and authorization committees, but because of his focus on the fiscal year 1992 appropriations for the VA-HUD panels his treatment of it is necessarily superficial. The subject is discussed in most detail in terms of the space station debate in which House authorizers--tacitly in league with the White House and the Senate--succeeded in overriding a decision by the House appropriators to terminate the project.

One unfortunate failure of the book is one of context: Munson virtually ignores the increasing importance of the budget committees, which have led the way in efforts to cope with rising budget deficits. The appropriations committees have been largely absent in this debate, a point that Munson could have used his unique vantage point to reflect upon. Munson deals with the issue mostly in terms of the hard choices faced by the subcommittees in dividing the appropriations pie and living within their allocations. He focuses on how these choices are made even more difficult for the VA-HUD panels because of their wide jurisdictions, which include space, scientific research, veterans affairs, the environment, and housing.

Munson introduces but does not pursue the point that the 13-subcommittee structure of the two appropriations committees is little changed from when they were established in the 1860s. Surely, this is too facile an observation. It is obvious that many of today's problems transcend the boundaries of the committees set in an earlier age. Indeed, a continuing problem for Congress--not only the appropriations committees--is that its organization and procedures are ill-suited to cope with many of the demands of a modern world.

The book's only major omission is its lack of statistical data on budget submissions and congressional actions on them over the years. Such data is important to a full assessment of the appropriations committees' power. One startling fact not mentioned by Munson is that in recent decades the appropriations process in the aggregate has resulted in approval of presidents' budgets in the 95 percent range. This indicates that Congress and the appropriations committees perform largely at the margins. Still, 5 percent of a budget this large in any given year is significant, just not quite as much as Munson and others might imply.

In the context of the entire book, my criticisms are minor. Munson's detailed and illuminating look at the appropriations process his central purpose is nothing other than superb. It should be required reading for students of government and for anyone trying to influence the legislative process.

William G. Wells, Jr. is a professor of management science at George Washington University and author of Working with Congress: A Practical Guide for Scientists and Engineers (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1992). He has worked as a senior staff member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee and in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wells, William G., Jr. "The Cardinals of Capitol Hill: The Men and Women Who Control Government Spending." Issues in Science and Technology, vol. 10, no. 4, 1994, p. 75+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A15672295/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bf6be6ba. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A15672295

QUOTED: "a well-written, insightful addition to the legacy of this still-underappreciated visionary genius."

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Print Marked Items
Tesla: Inventor of the Modern
Carl Hays
Booklist.
114.17 (May 1, 2018): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Tesla: Inventor of the Modern.
By Richard Munson.
May 2018. 320p. illus. Norton, $26.95 (9780393635447). 621.3092.
For his many popular groundbreaking inventions, from motion pictures to record players, Thomas Edison
rightfully earned his place in the history books as one of the worlds greatest inventors and entrepreneurs.
Yet, garnering less attention while he was alive and ultimately dying in poverty, Nikola Tesla, Edison's
contemporary, is often deemed by todays scientists and engineers--particularly Elon Musk, who named a car
after him--as the greater prodigy. In this celebratory, comprehensive profile of Tesla, author and cleanenergy-activist
Munson, in contrast to previous Tesla biographers, turns the spodight onto the inventor's
inner world, tracing the roots of Tesla's uncanny resourcefulness to his early family life. Born in Serbia,
allegedly during a midnight thunderstorm, Tesla grew up in the shadow of his polymath father and gifted
older brother, fueling both his later career, Munson argues, as a flamboyant showman, and his almostobsessive
passion to push his inventive creativity to extremes of impracticality. A well-written, insightful
addition to the legacy of this still-underappreciated visionary genius.--Carl Hays
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hays, Carl. "Tesla: Inventor of the Modern." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 54. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647329/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=af287e47.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539647329

QUOTED: "Readers will share Munson's frustration at this seeming frittering of a magnificent talent, but they will absolutely enjoy his sympathetic, insightful portrait."

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Munson, Richard: TESLA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Munson, Richard TESLA Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 5, 22 ISBN: 978-0-393-63544-7
A lucid, expertly researched biography of the brilliant Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), a contemporary and
competitor of Thomas Edison who was equally celebrated during his life.
Munson (From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity,
2005, etc.), who directs the Environment Defense Fund's clean energy work in the Midwest, emphasizes
that Tesla was a prodigy starting from his childhood in Serbia. Coming to the United States in 1884, he
worked for Edison, whose company was installing the first electric lighting in American cities using
complex direct current generators, which were limited to transmitting short distances and suitable only for
electric lighting. An eccentric workaholic who knew far more science than the uneducated Edison, Tesla
had been working on an efficient alternating current system. Edison rejected it, but George Westinghouse
hired Tesla; after a bitter, decadelong "war of currents," Tesla emerged victorious. His AC "dramatically
expanded the potential market for electricity, allowing it to be sold not just at night for lighting but also
during the day for factories, appliances, and streetcar lines. For the first time, [AC] could be pumped for
hundreds of miles and efficiently power machines as well as lamps." By the 1890s, Tesla was a wealthy
celebrity whose lectures thrilled audiences with demonstrations of spectacular electrical phenomena.
Although he continued to invent and patent essential features of radio, wireless telegraphy, and even
computers, he grew obsessed with visionary, expensive megaprojects--e.g., wireless power transmission--
most of which never panned out. Investors stopped investing, and he spent his final decades entertaining
journalists and the public with sometimes-accurate, often wacky predictions but producing little of
commercial value. As the author notes, "he believed the joy of inventing went beyond the accumulation of
profits."
Readers will share Munson's frustration at this seeming frittering of a magnificent talent, but they will
absolutely enjoy his sympathetic, insightful portrait.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Munson, Richard: TESLA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650623/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8ed45549.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650623

QUOTED: "Munson's evenhanded style generally avoids criticism of pork-barrel politics."

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The Cardinals of Capitol Hill: The Men
and Women Who Control Federal
Spending
Publishers Weekly.
240.31 (Aug. 2, 1993): p70.
COPYRIGHT 1993 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Munson (The Power Makers) tracked the 1991 work of the "VA-HUD" subcommittee, which oversees
grants to housing, the EPA and other domestic programs, through subcommittee negotiations, hearings on
the spending bill, arguments on the House floor and negotiations with the Senate. His reportage is most
illuminating when it shows how representatives shape their public gestures for political points, and how
little-known staffers--most of whom claim to be nonpartisan pragmatists--exert substantial power. However,
Munson's evenhanded style generally avoids criticism of pork-barrel politics, and shies away from an
analysis of lobbying influence. He concludes, perhaps a bit too optimistically, that Congressional
appropriators generally "serve our nation well." Illustrations not seen by PW (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Cardinals of Capitol Hill: The Men and Women Who Control Federal Spending." Publishers Weekly, 2
Aug. 1993, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A14232714/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=07ec1980. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14232714
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From Edison To Enron: the Business of
Power and What It Means for the Future
of Electricity
Reference & Research Book News.
21.1 (Feb. 2006):
COPYRIGHT 2006 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
027598740X
From Edison to Enron; the business of power and what it means for the future of electricity.
Munson, Richard.
Praeger
2005
206 pages
$39.95
Hardcover
HD9685
Munson (director, Northeast-Midwest Institute, a non-partisan research center) presents a history of the
development of the US electric power industry, tracing its development from the founding of the Edison
Electric Illuminating Company to the current state of the electric sector, characterized in Munson's view by
a centralized and monopolized paradigm that limits innovation, entrepreneurship, and efficiency. In telling
the industrial restructurings, technological innovations, corporate activities, and political battles that have
characterized the power industry's 100 year development, it seems that Munson's primary goal is to draw
lessons applicable to the regulation and structure of today's power industry, which he believes is in need of
"innovation-based restructuring."
([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"From Edison To Enron: the Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity." Reference
& Research Book News, Feb. 2006. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A141643442/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9e708269.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A141643442
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Keisling, Philip. "The power makers: the inside story of America's biggest business and its struggle to control tomorrow's electricity." Washington Monthly, Dec. 1985, p. 42+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A4041832/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=14d76a34. Accessed 15 July 2018. Gordon, Richard L. "From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity." The Energy Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 2007, p. 175+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A162520080/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=45f202ed. Accessed 15 July 2018. Wells, William G., Jr. "The Cardinals of Capitol Hill: The Men and Women Who Control Government Spending." Issues in Science and Technology, vol. 10, no. 4, 1994, p. 75+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A15672295/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bf6be6ba. Accessed 15 July 2018. Hays, Carl. "Tesla: Inventor of the Modern." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647329/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Munson, Richard: TESLA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650623/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "The Cardinals of Capitol Hill: The Men and Women Who Control Federal Spending." Publishers Weekly, 2 Aug. 1993, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A14232714/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "From Edison To Enron: the Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity." Reference & Research Book News, Feb. 2006. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A141643442/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018.

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/tesla-inventor-of-the-modern
  Word count: 949

  QUOTED: "brisk, entertaining new biography."
  "generous, penetrating portrait."

  Tesla: Inventor of the Modern
  By Richard Munson W.W. Norton & Company 320 pp.
  Reviewed by David Raney
  May 30, 2018
  An entertaining, sympathetic glimpse into the life of the under-appreciated genius.

  Electricity, Edmund Morris observed in a 2012 essay on Thomas Edison, is a kind of primal enigma, powerful but invisible. Its effects can be seen and felt but “it has no color…no character.”

  It’s hard to imagine a less apt description for Nikola Tesla, whose life, offered as a novel outline, would prompt any editor to send the author packing. But as Richard Munson’s brisk, entertaining new biography makes clear, Tesla was and remains an enigma of sorts, testing our notions of genius, fame, even the coherent personality.

  As one example, he may well have made the first X-ray image in human history — it was of Mark Twain’s hand — and this is not in the top 10 things Tesla will be remembered for, assuming he is remembered at all.

  Munson lays out this thoroughly researched volume chronologically, each chapter linked to a city. The peripatetic Tesla was born in what today is Croatia, at the stroke of midnight during a thunderstorm (accompanied by a lightning bolt, it’s tempting to say, and as Tesla himself claimed, though he was perhaps not in the best position to recall).

  He worked in Budapest, New York, Pittsburgh, London, and Chicago, amassing some 300 patents and inventing so feverishly (at times literally so) that one might think his name would be forever linked with Einstein’s and Edison’s.

  Seventy-five years after his death, though, it is not. Tesla was world-famous once, but in 2018, his name tends to bring to mind Elon Musk’s car, or perhaps an 80s metal band. Munson doesn’t dwell on this twist of cultural memory, but he demonstrates in considerable detail why it shouldn’t be so.

  One reason for the historical amnesia may be that Tesla, alongside his striking list of personal dualities — the dapper ditch-digger, the shy showman, the famous footnote — was Edison’s opposite in two important ways.

  The Wizard of Menlo Park, Tesla’s hero-turned-rival whom he met on his second day in America, was a master at funding and public relations, while Tesla was miserable at making and managing money. Typically, out of loyalty to his benefactor, George Westinghouse, he once tore up a contract that would have made him a vast fortune.

  The two men, obviously both brilliant, also worked very differently. Edison came to his discoveries by teamwork and painstaking trial and error, afterward promoting and defending those inventions vigorously.

  Tesla worked best alone and was subject all his life to visions, “flashes” as he called them, in which groundbreaking ideas arrived complete as if drawn in the air by some “borrowed mind,” to use his own description of a robot.

  This is not to denigrate Tesla’s work ethic, for he was capable of fanatical effort and concentration. In school, he studied from 3 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week, and when on the trail of an idea, he had a “mania for finishing,” neglecting his health and the rest of the external world until the peculiar music of his mental spheres tuned itself to practical harmony.

  In one such eureka moment, witnessed by a colleague (otherwise, it might cause a reader to suspect fabrication), Tesla walked out one evening after grappling all day with an electric motor problem, reciting poetry — “Faust,” of all things — when “the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed: He grabbed a stick and quickly drew a diagram in the sand of an innovative motor that utilized a rotating magnetic field. ‘The images were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone,’ he said.”

  Installed in a laboratory, however, with teammates and a salary, Tesla chafed and became bored. And he cared little for the public competition of ideas, for claiming to be first and best loudly and often enough to carry the day. So while Tesla decisively won the “War of the Currents” pitting Edison’s direct current against his own alternating current, which we all use today, he lost the PR battle.

  And not just against Edison. “Eight months after his death,” Munson tells us, “the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled Tesla as the true inventor of radio” — a distinction that most schoolbooks still accord to Marconi.

  Tesla died in debt, penniless and feeding pigeons, and he suffered from phobias (germs, pearls, and much else) and was very likely obsessive-compulsive. But however well this might accord with our stereotyped notions of genius as tormented and alien, Munson is never lurid in treating this side of his subject, wisely showing us not only Tesla’s quirks and foibles, but also how much we owe him for an astonishing array of inventions that permeate the modern world: radio, remote control, robots, lasers, loudspeakers, the list goes on.

  A tribute upon his death by the New York Sun called Tesla “an eccentric, whatever that means,” and went on: “He was seeing a glimpse into that confused and mysterious frontier which divides the known and the unknown…Probably we shall appreciate him better a few million years from now.”

  This generous, penetrating portrait should move that timetable up considerably.

  David Raney is a writer and editor in Atlanta.

• Niagara Gazette
  http://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/glynn-new-book-delves-into-life-of-tesla/article_2c1bf0e1-7f09-5627-a23d-ceea7abac1af.html
  Word count: 692

  QUOTED: "In Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, by Richard Munson, ... the author has produced a highly-readable account of a man credited with significant advances in developing the radio, robots and remote controls."

  GLYNN: New book delves into life of Tesla
  By DON GLYNN don.glynn@niagara-gazette.com 7 hrs ago
  GLYNN: New book delves into life of Tesla
  Don Glynn

  After dozens of biographies and countless articles, finally there’s a riveting story about Nikola Tesla, a genius whose vision helped shape the modern era of electricity.

  Until now, except for the fact that he was a Serb born in what today is Croatia and a pioneer in the development of the alternating current for the long-range transmission of electricity, little is known about his bizarre private life. As some historians familiar with his background and scientific accomplishments contend, he is perhaps one of the most under-appreciated visionaries in the last two centuries. Not everyone ignored him. One example, Elon Musk’s car bears his name. There’s also a statue of Tesla seated in a big chair on Goat Island though some tourists seem to think it’s an ideal place to let kids climb up and sit in his lap.

  In “Tesla: Inventor of the Modern,” by Richard Munson (Norton & Co., 306 pages, hardcover, 2018) the author has produced a highly-readable account of a man credited with significant advances in developing the radio, robots and remote controls. It’s true that Marconi is often cited for inventing the radio, as Munson notes, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that patents of Tesla first described the system for transmitting wireless signals over a long distance. The author also reminds us that while Tesla’s electric motors run our appliances and factories, Thomas Edison is a legendary figures who is more famous. The spirited competition between the two is thoroughly and fairly covered in this book.

  Even the reader who has read a lot about Tesla might be surprised to learn that he was an acute germaphobe who would never shake hands. In addition, he required nine napkins whenever he sat down to dinner. We’re told about a party he hosted one night for several close friends and he delayed their departure for the late train to Philadelphia because he had a premonition that “ill adventure would befall them.” The next day, they learned that same train had encountered a horrific accident that killed many passengers. He never offered any scientific explanation of that forewarning.

  Tesla was acknowledged for his role in advancing the long-range delivery of electricity from Niagara Falls to the 1895 National Electrical Exposition in New York City. Closer to home, the alternating current system he had developed provided the power for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

  •••

  FOREVER WILD?: Tourists stopping in Youngstown, enroute to Old Fort Niagara, asked a good question: “Why is that grass mowed all along the upper section of that parkway and around Whirlpool State Park, but once you start heading down the (Lewiston) hill, you can’t see hardly anything because of the tall grass and weeds?” Surely they couldn’t be talking about the Niagara Scenic Parkway, named by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

  On a serious note, parkway motorists need to heed those roadside warning signs of “Deer Crossing,” especially on the stretch between Lewiston and Youngstown. The grass is so high in some places the fleeting deer could probably bash into your vehicle before you even spot them coming.

  •••

  ACROSS THE BORDER: An article in the current issue of The Economist states that the real test of the typical Canadian’s reaction to President Trump’s tariffs — imposed on goods always flock to the Sun Belt from their country — may be measured this winter, when hundreds of thousands of people from north of the border flock to the Sun Belt like Florida and Arizona to escape the harsh weather. Many of those “snowbirds” may now fly to other places, dealing a blow to the U.S. economy.

• EH.net
  https://eh.net/book_reviews/from-edison-to-enron-the-business-of-power-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-electricity/
  Word count: 1682

  QUOTED: "Students of economics and business could use the book as an industry case study to explore notions about natural monopoly and deregulation, although the approach would have to be largely anecdotal because the book lacks systematic data. ... But the 'hustling entrepreneurs ... are likely to embrace it."

  From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity
  Author(s): Munson, Richard
  Reviewer(s): Sicilia, David B.
  Published by EH.NET (January 2008)

  Richard Munson, From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. v + 207 pp. $40 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-275-98740-X.

  Reviewed for EH.NET by David B Sicilia, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park.

  This book ? by Washington D.C.-based electric industry policy analyst Richard Munson ? is a hybrid. In the first half (approximately), the author provides a concise history, focused chiefly on economics and regulation, of the U.S. electric power industry from its beginnings to 2004. In the second half, he moves onto firmer ground to offer his recommendations for making the nation’s largest industry (assets: $600 billion) more efficient and innovative. For Munson, the answer, in a word, is competition. Stated more fully, “regulators and lawmakers must challenge vested interests and eliminate the outmoded regulatory, financial, and environmental barriers to competition and entrepreneurs” (p. 132).

  As a work of history, From Edison to Enron, although chronologically ambitious, is derivative. Most historical industry studies focus on the industry’s formative decades of the 1880s through the 1930s, out of which emerged the dominant paradigm of central station, alternating current power and incandescent lighting. Few works span the industry’s 125-year history, as this book does. Munson does a competent, if occasionally repetitive, job of summarizing this long story, yet he offers no new interpretations based on fresh theoretical thinking or archival research. And there are too few source citations and some blunders. Passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act was not “prompted” by price-fixing attempts by Charles Coffin and Henry Villard (p. 22). Samuel Insull did not organize the National Civic Federation (p. 56).

  Munson’s tour through electric power history lays the groundwork for his policy recommendations. In this account, lively competition among industry founders came to an end when “Monopolists” (the title of Chapter 3), especially Samuel Insull of Chicago Edison, built enormous regional electric supply systems and holding company empires and devoted considerable resources to lobbying and public relations in order to retain power. (Munson says nothing of Insull’s great insight about load factor.) Government actors are the next set of villains, for abetting monopolization, blanketing the industry with stifling regulations, and building their own sluggish systems (such as the TVA and the Bonneville Power Administration). The nuclear power story carries the theme forward. Without federal government largess ? heavy investment in R&D, indemnification of private investors against risk, and generous private-sector subsidies ? industry would not have gone down what proved to be an economic path best not taken. The monopolists’ heyday came to an end in the 1960s and 1970s, when the industry confronted serious challenges: “blackouts, protests, embargoes, accidents, and defaults” (p. 83). By this time, utility managers had lost any spark of innovation, while environmentalists misguidedly lobbied the state for new controls.

  The hinge-point in the story was the beginning of competition. Munson first says that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Otter Tail decision (which required a private utility to allow several municipals to transmit power over its lines without cost) “marked the onset of competition” (p. 89). Later, he confusingly states that lobbying by a New Hampshire-based cogenerator (Wheelabrator-Frye Corporation) in 1978 ? which led to passage of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) that year ? represented “the opening of utility monopolies to limited competition” (p. 104). Munson carries the story through the 1992 Energy Policy Act, which deregulated further; through the colossal bankruptcy of the Washington Public Power Supply System (a.k.a. “Whoops”) in 1983; and through Enron’s collapse and the 2001 California “electricity disaster” (p. 122) it had helped engineer. The narrative chapters conclude on a more positive note, with vignettes of entrepreneurs and municipalities experimenting with new conservation, generation, and transmission and distribution (T&D) technologies.

  In the policy chapters, several of Munson’s recommendations seem reasonable and are supported by history. T&D is currently a greater regulatory conundrum than power plants. Electricity has long moved across state lines and therefore should be subject to more federal and less state regulation. Better system interconnection and load shifting would increase both efficiency and reliability. The grid should be opened to greater competition, although Munson is not specific about how original T&D owners should be compensated for their heavy investments. Central station utility managers (especially in the South) should devote more resources to innovation, and less to fending off the rising tide of competition.

  But on several key issues, Munson is either inaccurate or unpersuasive. Consider, for example, the crucial issue of economies of scale. While it is true that the rate of growth of central station thermal efficiency leveled off in the late 1960s, Munson asserts that thereafter “economies of scale didn’t apply any longer” (p. 85), and again later, that central stations “lost” (p. 177) their economies of scale in recent decades. To read Munson’s account, decentralized power is always more efficient than centralized generation. While it is true that cogeneration captures significant efficiencies through dual-tasking and by minimizing line losses, most residential and commercial electricity customers do not require enough ambient or manufacturing-process heat to make cogeneration less costly than central station power ? which continues to capture enormous economies of scale.

  Utility regulation is another problematic topic in this book. While acknowledging that utilities should remain under minimal regulation, Munson seems quite prepared to let markets work their wonders to supply the nation’s power needs. Enron, in this telling, was an unfortunate episode in an otherwise well-functioning, efficiency-maximizing energy market. Munson is brave enough to acknowledge that Enron and California’s faux blackout were precisely the outcome predicted by critics of aggressive electric utility deregulation, but he’s not persuaded that the securitization of energy introduces unacceptable levels of risk. In his view, the Enron debacle was separate and apart from energy trading (p. 120).

  Hostile to the notion of natural monopoly, this book does not consider the notion that electric power is a utility “affected with a public interest.” In the final chapter, Munson points to railroad, telecommunication, and airline deregulation to argue that competition led to greater efficiency and lower prices in each case. He does not mention the degradation of service that has accompanied the rate cuts. Airline competition hasn’t led to more plane crashes, but service is deplorable, and the oligopoly is shrinking by the month. These are, of course, issues that political economists debate in church as well as between the covers of monographs. So to keep the focus on this particular industry: Would our society tolerate more frequent electrical outages? Munson acknowledges the greater financial risks that come with energy markets, but not the connection between financial and technological risk. This is not to say that deregulated electric power is less reliable than competitive power. But because Munson informs us that today’s high-tech customers are damaged by services interruptions measured in the billionths of a second, the question deserves attention.

  One hopes that the roster of energy-efficient technologies briefly profiled in this book ? compact fluorescent lamps, back-pressure steam turbines, microturbines, biomass-powered turbines, wind turbines, combined-cycle gas turbines, fuel cells, superconducting transmission lines, semiconductor-based switches, remotely readable meters ? will proliferate, and the sooner the better. They are making headway, although Munson gives inconsistent evidence about their progress, first deriding “the present system’s virtually total reliance on large plants and long lines” (p. 178), then reporting that nearly a third of the nation’s electricity comes from independent power producers (p. 187).

  Earth Day was first observed thirty-seven years ago. We now know that our energy future will be powered by a variety of increasingly renewable sources. In that sense, this book ? by leaning so hard against a technology (central station power) that for much of the century achieved the greatest economies of scale of any industry ? seems overreaching. Dismantling all those giant power plants anytime soon is no more plausible than ending our dependence on fossil fuels on the near horizon. Will deregulation help us get more efficient energy faster? Not across the board, and even Munson acknowledges that regulation is needed “to enforce market rules and protect against abuses” (p. 174). I doubt our society is prepared to expose what is arguably the most essential component of the economy’s infrastructure to the gales of creative destruction.

  Which readers will find this book most useful? Business and technology historians won’t find engagement with key concepts such as path dependence, technological determinism, system-building, and first-mover advantage. Students of economics and business could use the book as an industry case study to explore notions about natural monopoly and deregulation, although the approach would have to be largely anecdotal because the book lacks systematic data. Regulators ? accused of “having an identity crisis” (p. 162) because regulation is no longer warranted ? are improbable fans. Central station utility managers will find it too partisan. But the “hustling entrepreneurs” (p. 101) who are chipping away at the energy establishment and who are the heroes of this book are likely to embrace it as their version of history.

  David B. Sicilia is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is co-author or co-editor of six books and many articles, including studies of electrification, and is currently working on a history of post World War II U.S. political economy.

  Subject(s): Transport and Distribution, Energy, and Other Services
  Geographic Area(s): North America
  Time Period(s): 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-688-07450-0
  Word count: 196

  QUOTED: "Neither Cousteau nor the Cousteau Society ... has delivered on promises to protect the environment."

  Cousteau, the Captain and His World: The Captain and His World
  Richard Munson, Author, Bruce Lee, Editor William Morrow & Company $19.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-688-07450-0

  MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
  Known best for his books, television specials and enviromental activism, Jacques Cousteau is also co-inventor of scuba-diving equipment, underwater vehicles and artificial islands. Yet at 79, he remains an elusive figure to the public. Munson ( America's Cup 1987 ) avers that Cousteau has rested on his laurels in recent years, drowning in his own legend, accepting compromises in the quality of his productions. While the films and books have increased the public's knowledge of the underseas world and the threats to it, neither Cousteau nor the Cousteau Society, according to Munson, has delivered on promises to protect the environment. The arguments presented cause the reader to conclude that although Cousteau is a man of great charm, a talented filmmaker and superb showman, he is not a scientist and less sensitive to environmental concerns than his public persona suggests. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)

• Shelf-Awareness
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3241#m40277
  Word count: 490

  Book Review
  Review: Tesla: Inventor of the Modern
  Tesla: Inventor of the Modern by Richard Munson (W.W. Norton, $26.95 hardcover, 320p., 9780393635447, May 22, 2018)

  It's not unusual to find electrical engineers and inventors skewed to the fringe edge of the weirdness spectrum, but Nikola Tesla was in a class all his own, as represented in Richard Munson's illustrated biography, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern. He was a Croatian-born ethnic Serbian immigrant who stood six-foot-two, weighed 140 pounds, dressed to the nines, spoke eight languages, slept only three hours a day, memorized and wrote poetry, filed 300 patents and mesmerized Wall Street investor audiences with crackling Jedi-like light tubes arcing between eight-foot electrically charged plates. He was like an uber-nerd forerunner of Elon Musk--the charismatic entrepreneur who named his car company after Tesla. On the other hand, Tesla was also a celibate germaphobe, a superstitious numerologist and a lousy businessman who died broke at age 86, in the New Yorker Hotel.

  More than just a biography of this strange genius, however, Munson's Tesla is a history of the nascent electric power industry and men like Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Guglielmo Marconi, who competed with Tesla to bring the miracle of electricity to the masses. Under license to Westinghouse, Tesla's "alternating current" generator converted the electricity market from Edison's "direct current" limited access system to the ubiquitous power grid in place today.

  Thanks to Tesla's genius, the world had the infrastructure to build mass manufacturing operations, global communication networks and massive power plants. At his peak, he engineered the complete electrical system for Chicago's 1893 "White City" Columbian Exposition, and consulted on the design of the mammoth Niagara Falls generators. He erected towers in Colorado and on Long Island to experiment with wireless power transmission, and even built an "electro-mechanical oscillator" to transmit electricity through the earth's natural resonance--until the NYPD shut him down after his lab neighbors complained about earthquakes.

  A Midwest businessman and energy wonk, Munson (From Edison to Enron) taps a variety of primary sources, industry trade literature and Tesla's autobiography, My Inventions, to flesh out this enigmatic inventor and contrarian thinker. Munson lets us peek into the drama and nuance of Tesla's world--from his early years with his domineering Orthodox Catholic priest father and literal "homemaker" mother, to the fancy Murray Hill salon dinners of socialites Katharine and Robert Johnson and ultimately to his lonely death in a cluttered Midtown hotel room. An inventor's inventor, Tesla never managed to leverage his genius into the wealth that Edison did. Rather than occupying prime real estate in the Smithsonian like Edison, Tesla's fame may ride into the future on the wheels of Musk's transformative Tesla automobile. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

  Shelf Talker: Rich in historical and personal detail, Tesla tells the extraordinary story of the eccentric and enigmatic inventor whose genius transformed the global power industry.

• Energy News
  https://energynews.us/2018/05/18/midwest/commentary-new-book-explores-nikola-teslas-clean-energy-vision/
  Word count: 717

  Commentary: New book explores Nikola Tesla’s clean energy vision
  Dick MunsonMay 18, 2018

  Dick Munson is a clean energy advocate and author of a new book, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern

  Nikola Tesla gave us the electric motor, long-distance electricity transmission, radio, robots, and remote control – the very foundations of our modern economy. Perhaps less well known is that he also was a clean-energy pioneer, and he remains an inspiration to today’s solar and battery entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, who views him as a hero and contributed $1 million to help restore Tesla’s laboratory on Long Island.

  Tesla marked his clean-energy leadership with a 1900 article in The Century – then the nation’s largest-circulation periodical. Published 118 years ago, “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy, with Special References to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy” was one of the earliest, detailed looks at capturing power from the sun and wind.

  At his core, Tesla appreciated efficiency and hated energy waste, complaining that we “do not utilize more than 2 percent of coal’s energy” to make electricity. “The man who should stop this senseless waste would be a great benefactor of humanity,” he declared.

  Tesla, of course, thought big, sometimes unreasonably so. One of his grander proposals was to send artificial lightning into the ground, take advantage of the planet’s electric charge, and prompt resonance in order to allow everyone around the world to plug into the earth and obtain essentially free electricity.

  As the world faces major challenges – from climate change to pervasive poverty, Tesla, who died 75 years ago, remains particularly relevant. We need inventors — people willing and able to see the world differently — and Tesla epitomizes the inventive spirit. Commenting on the excitement of discovery, he wrote: “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”

  While most of today’s innovations are developed by teams within universities, federal laboratories and corporate research centers, Tesla demonstrated the power of what he called cerebral engineering. He claimed to be able to visualize inventions in his head, where he would test alternative configurations, and he claimed, with some exaggeration, that he could “give exact measurements to the workmen without having made even a sketch.” He envisioned his revolutionary electric motor, for instance, while walking through a Budapest park and quoting Goethe’s Faust.

  While Thomas Edison the entrepreneur developed new products in order to make money, Tesla – although he certainly enjoyed his lavish meals at Delmonico’s and his fancy room at the Waldorf Astoria — believed that technology transcended the marketplace and that invention should not just be tied to profits. He wrote: “The desire that guides me in all I do is the desire to harness the forces of nature to the service of mankind.”

  Tesla, as noted before, gave us motors, robots, and radio, but he kept imagining. Many of his designs – including sonar, smart watches, and death rays – would inspire great minds for generations.

  Noting today’s risk- and innovation-averse electricity industry, we could benefit greatly from Tesla’s selfless, out-of-the-box thinking. He’d probably be envisioning ways to send power wirelessly, to generate it without pollution, and to provide drudgery-reducing energy to everyone, including the two billion people around the world still without access to electricity.

  No doubt Tesla aimed high, perhaps higher than any other inventor. He worked tirelessly to offer electric power freely to the world and to build robots that would reduce life’s drudgery. He was, in short, driven by inner forces that made sheer creation the most important thing in his life. And we are the better for it.

  Richard (Dick) Munson, a senior director at Environmental Defense Fund, is the author of Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, which Kirkus, in a starred review, called “a lucid expertly research biography of the brilliant Nikola Tesla. (Readers) will absolutely enjoy (Munson’s) sympathetic, insightful portrait.” More reviews, speaking engagements, and order information can be found at www.tesla-book.com

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