Before there was Steve Jobs, there was Norman Bel Geddes.
B. ALEXANDRA SZERLIP was a two-time National Endowment for the ArtsWriting Fellow, a Yaddo fellow, and runner-up for London's LothianPrize for a first biography-in-progress. She has contributed toTheParis Review DailyandThe Believer, among other publications, and hasworked in professional theater, as a book editor, sculptor and graphicdesigner. Raised on the East Coast, she lives in San Francisco.
"An exceptional profile [of Norman Bel Geddes]... Szerlip's
detailedness and thorough research is evident in this supportive
yet fair telling of this complex, controversial genius."
—INNOVATION magazine
“A rich, swift, and entrancing new biography...Smart and
charming.” —Boston Review
“In this fascinating and minutely researched biography, Szerlip
brings the brilliant, indefatigable industrial designer's
imagination to life...A remarkable rediscovery of a man ahead of
his time.” —Booklist / American Library Association (starred
review)
“Szerlip takes great care to capture the fundamentally theatrical
quality of Bel Geddes’s rise, balancing creative license with
considerable research in order to produce a narrative that’s fast
paced yet rich with detail....A thorough and exciting biography of
one of the most imaginative designers of the modern
age.” —Library Journal
“Engaging...Szerlip gives full rein to Bel Geddes’s strengths
without brushing aside his paradoxes...[He] exited the stage at the
high summer of an American future he had envisioned in fine detail
long before we lived it.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Set designer, automobile stylist, architect, founding father of
American industrial design, inventor of genius, Norman Bel Geddes
was volcanically talented and sui generis. In her lively and
scrupulously well-researched biography, B. Alexandra Szerlip gives
him a deserved place as a key visionary of modernity.” —Nikil
Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace
“What a riveting story—of a gloriously giddy time when one man
could revolutionize the way everything, from Broadway to kitchen
scales, looks and works! Is being forgotten one of the ironic
penalties of being an American visionary? Once you've
succeeded in giving the future reality, the present no longer needs
you. Thank you, Ms. Szerlip, for the vivacious
restoration!” —John Guare, Playwright, Six Degrees of
Separation
“I learned a lot about Norman Bel Geddes from B.
Alexandra Szerlip's book. He was a complex, controversial genius,
worthy of this biography. His visionary design of GM's Futurama
exhibit for the 1939 NY World's Fair revolutionized people's
thinking about the future.” —Don Norman, bestselling author of
The Design of Everyday Things, and Director, DesignLab, UC San
Diego
“A sympathetic portrait of a guy with such an appetite for
creation...Put him on the list with Da Vinci, Verne, Disney and
Steve Jobs—he’s somewhere in between all of them.”—The Last
Bookstore Blog
"The Man Who Designed the Future is a meticulously researched
account of Norman Bel Geddes, an ocean-going huckster of genius,
until now largely forgotten." —THE SPECTATOR
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
