James Mackay always does a superb job of researching his biographies. Many of our readers have read his wonderful book about the great hero of Scotland, William Wallace. This time the author rises to the challenge of another Scottish/American hero - Alexander Graham Bell. Many of you will be surprised to find out that Alexander Graham Bell was a Scot but he was born in Edinburgh in 1847 to a warm and loving family. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was one of the leading elocutionists of the nineteenth century and his mother, Eliza, was severely hearing impaired.

We all know the story of his invention the telephone. He had moved to Boston by then and so the great event in which the famous words. "Mr. Watson come here --- I want to see you" were uttered in the United States. Mr. Mackay give us great insight into the trial and tribulations Alexander Graham Bell went through after his discovery of the telephone. The saddest being the many people who declared it was their invention and were constantly dragging Alex into court.

I had always assumed that Alexander Graham Bell became a wealthy man but in this book you will learn how it spent all of his resources on new inventions and fighting legal battles. He became very interested in lighter than air flight and did major work in this area on his estate in Nova Scotia which depleted his financial resouces drastically.

The underlying theme of all Alec's work was to help the hearing impaired and it was that devotion which made this book such a meaningful experience for me. I want to share with you Mr. Mackay's words which will explain what I mean.

Today Alexander Graham Bell is best remembered as an inventor, with the telephone as his lasting achievement. His contribution to science, largely financial, is far less well known, but it was crucial at the time and deserves to be more widely appreciated. While he reveled in the epithets of inventor and scientist often applied to his name in the popular press, Alec himself regarded his main contribution to humanity his work with the deaf. It was his deep-seated concern and compassion for a section of the handicapped community which seldom got understanding or sympathy from the general public which ruled his life and governed his actions at all times. Even the telephone, which the deaf could never use, owed its genesis to his unique understanding of the physiology of hearing. Apart from the telephone, an abiding interest in the deaf would lead Alec into other strange byways, such as pioneering studies of heredity and eugenics and to some extent his work on the graphophone and the photophone was inspired by his ongoing commitment to the deaf. But all this was peripheral to the work that was at the very core of his being, and which would continue to absorb a considerable amount of his time and money till the day be died. Alex's role as a humanitarian, so completely overshadowed by his one really great invention, has not received the general recognition it deserves. During his lifetime, moreover, his methods were not always understood, and indeed, they would earn him a great deal of calumny and opprobrium, every bit as damaging as the attacks on his integrity and reputation during the prolonged telephone litigations.

The story of his devotion to bring sound to people who have always had silence makes this book worth reading and will give you a totally different view of this famous Scot.