Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This life of George Eastman is the first biography since 1930 of the man who transformed the world of photography. As a 23-year-old bank clerk, Eastman bought his first camera and began simplifying the cumbersome and messy wet-plate process. With only two years' experience, he patented a dry-plate coating machine and began selling photographic plates. Soon, the business was doing so well that he quit his job at the bank and started his own company. Eastman's success was based in part on his own inventions, but even more on his ability to raise capital, recruit technically skilled employees, sell his own products, and outmaneuver his competitors. In this revealing and informative new biography, Brayer shows us how such key innovations as roll film and the light, hand-held camera helped the Eastman Kodak Company dominate the world market. More importantly, Brayer draws a vivid portrait of the man behind the money. Eastman worked hard at keeping out of the limelight and even insisted that his donations be kept anonymous, prompting the Boston Globe to call him "America's most modest and least- known millionaire." His aggressive business personality was a sharp contrast to his personal life: Eastman once joked that it was his goal to take two six-month vacations in a year. He would regularly forsake the office to bicycle around Europe or ride a stagecoach through the snowy trails of Yellowstone Park. He was an art lover, who once bartered 60 shares of Kodak stock in the 1890s for a painting he felt he must have, and a classical music enthusiast, who built a school for the training of virtuosos. Despite his retirement in 1925, Eastman showed little sign of slowing down. Making money had been interesting, but putting money to work became more so. In the 1920s he designed a special camera for use in orthodontia and established elaborate dental clinics for needy children in Rochester, London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, and Rome. He oversaw the building of the Eastman Theatre and the Eastman School of Music. His contributions built a new campus for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a new medical school for the University of Rochester. Finally, he became the largest contributor to the education of African Americans during the 1920s and the Tuskeegee Institute's most important benefactor.

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Library Journal Review

Brayer, a former historian at the Eastman House in Rochester, New York, has written the second biography of George Eastman to make it to publication. The first, written in 1930 by Carl Ackerman, was commissioned and edited by Eastman himself. Since then, several others have been commissioned by Kodak but have never been published, including attempts by such capable historians as André Maurois and Beaumont Newhall. Whatever speculation this may create, historian Brayer does not seem to have presented a romanticized or sanitized version of Eastman's entrepreneurial and philanthropic efforts. The text serves as a history of technological revolution in the photographic medium and the emergence of "big business" via the Kodak empire. It is also a detail-rich look at turn-of-the-century central New York. An essential purchase for most libraries.‘Kathy J. Anderson Indiana Univ., Bloomington (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In 1904, when the Dalai Lama had to flee Tibet, he took his Kodak camera. Worldwide, people understood. The cultural revolution begun in 1888 when George Eastman (1854-1932) made photography accessible to anyone with $25 had been completed in 1900, when his Brownie made picture-taking possible for anyone with a dollar (and 15ø for film). Brayer, a historian at the Eastman-endowed International Museum of Photography and Film, has written a candid, fact-crammed life of the first camera-and-film tycoon that loses somewhat in liveliness by leaving out almost nothing about how the camera business was dominated for years by Eastman's canny and baronial practices. A bank clerk as a young man, he was astute enough by his late 20s to weather financial difficulties and manufacture cheap, workable film while withstanding what would become decades of litigation, much of which he won, over patent infringement and antitrust charges. In the end the mother's boy who could never cut the silver cord and marry was wedded to an enterprise that made him, in wealth, a peer of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford. Catchphrases advertising his cameras ("You Press the Button, We Do the Rest") sold billions of feet of film and threatened to make "Kodak" a common noun for "camera." He resisted with challenges over trademark and with the maxim "If it isn't an Eastman it isn't a Kodak." His relentless social Darwinism would pay off in consolidations, mergers and buyouts that left him with so many dollars (and no heirs) that only massive educational and cultural philanthropies could reduce the accumulation. "Mr. Eastman," one associate concluded, "was the only man I ever knew who started out a conservative and wound up a liberal." Brayer's biography of the boy fired up by "Oliver Optic" stories such as Work and Win and A Millionaire at Sixteen captures the expansive if callous period in American business in which such fortunes were made. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Brayer's sweeping biography traces Eastman's life from his family's roots in the utopian Oneida Community and the antislavery movement, through his defining contributions to Rochester, New York. Early recognizing the importance of the amateur to the future of photography, Eastman succeeded in capturing that market by a combination of patent protection, rapid innovation, and mass production that lowered prices. This is not only a full history of the Eastman Kodak Company, but a rounded picture of the man responsible for its dominance. A "taciturn, cautious, shy, modest" bachelor with no interest in small talk or gossip, Eastman had a remarkable capacity for friendship with both women and men. As his wealth grew, his major philanthropies included education (Tuskegee, MIT, Rochester), medicine, and clinical dentistry. A music lover, he supported an organist, a resident quintet, a string quartet, a chamber orchestra, and founded the Eastman Theater and School of Music. An adventurous traveler, he spent long periods in Europe and Africa, never out of touch for long with his company. A masterful biography of an authentic, in many ways heroic, US industrialist. All levels. A. B. Stewart emeritus, Antioch College