Who wouldn't want to read about "the most beautiful woman in the world" (as several of Hedy Lamarr's promoters dubbed her, at various points in her life)? What geek wouldn't be further attracted by reading about her invention of spread-spectrum frequency-hopping technology, which today is essential to just about any wireless communication device? And what fan of science and technology history wouldn't want to read a short new book by Richard Rhodes, author of Making of the Atomic Bomb?This book has all that going for it... and not much else. It's a biography of Lamarr, but skims her movie career and stops at the time of her invention (during WWII), giving only a couple pages to the last 55 years of her life. It's also, in nearly equal page count, a biography of her co-inventor George Antheil, a composer and writer who also seems like an interesting guy—but that's not mentioned at the outset, presumably because he's less sexy than Lamarr. The technology is adequately described, but not in enough real technical detail for anyone with the requisite physics to follow its evolution and development, which feels like a missed opportunity when it's so central to contemporary life. And as a history, it often feels tossed together, a sequence of notes and quotations rather than a structured narrative.But it's a quick read, mostly fun, and piqued my curiosity for further reading.
