Book in the news... how James Dyson cleaned up with vacuums
Invention
A Life
James Dyson
Simon & Schuster (£25)
“James Dyson was a less than stellar student at the boarding school he attended in Norfolk … where his father was a classics master,” says Henry Petroski in The Wall Street Journal. After leaving school, he studied drawing and painting at art school, then interior design and architecture. It certainly wasn’t an obvious background for a man who latterly made a fortune as the inventor of a “revolutionary vacuum cleaner” and other “novel domestic appliances”. In Invention, his “definitive memoir”, Dyson builds on his previous autobiography (Against the Odds, published in 1997), to tell the story of how it happened and how he turned his “paradigm-shifting” products into the basis for “a family-owned global manufacturing empire”.
This book is an “entertaining and inspiring” memoir by someone “who’s nearly impossible to pigeonhole”, says Kirkus Reviews. Dyson is partly a “geeky scientist and engineer”, who is eager to describe “the biological parameters of building the perfect hair dryer”. However, he is also passionate about politics, warning that Britain, Europe and North America are being left behind by Asia, which “is growing at three times the rate of Western economies”. He also makes a “powerful argument” that our educational systems are not giving sufficient attention to “fostering creativity and the independent spirit required of the inventor, thereby stifling innovation”.
There is “much to admire” about the book, says Oliver Shah in The Sunday Times. Indeed, “fans of engineering will enjoy the detailed descriptions”. However, apart from a “moving” section about the loss of Dyson’s father, readers “hoping for a fuller picture of the man who has done so much to reshape our domestic lives will be disappointed”. What’s more, his complaints about rivals “that lobbied retail chains not to promote his products” appear a little hollow when he himself also been accused of “aggressive tactics against smaller rivals”. His anger at Britain’s supposed “disdain” for manufacturing overlooks the fact that “the sector, and he in particular, have arguably often been fetishised”.