Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution; The Genius of Man and Place Book

Faraday was a very interesting guy. Almost entirely self-taught, and apparently almost mathematically illiterate, he had both conceptual and experimental genius that may well have outshone anyone else in the first half of the 19th century.

That said, I found this book boring. I picked it up because I had nothing to read one day on campus, and the only handy library was the physics library... To be fair, Thomas is not a writer. He's a scientist and administrator. I don't think he did a very good job of structuring this book - he divided it into multiple portions, the first on Faraday's science, the second on his writings, and the third on his life. It's far more fascinating to see these things together. Use his writings to explain his science, discuss his life and science together (like Bryson did in A Short History of Nearly Everything).

Plus, it's just a hagiography. And a paen to the Royal Institution, written by an administrator... Oh, and Thomas is a chemist, so he's far more interested in that aspect of Faraday's science than the physics, which is my interest.