Edison's Eve, by Gaby Wood
A nice companion to Standage's "The Turk". Wood tells a general story of the history of automata and the quest to make mechanical life. She provides a broad history... but (IMHO) she bogs down with some odd flights of psycho-historical analysis, wandering down interesting and wholly unrelated subjects - the life and times of midgets in particular. I understand that her argument is that they are associated.... but I think her interpretive readings of things are distracting.
