The Grid Summary

A history of how society masters, uses and abuses electricity, and the ultimate expansion of electricity across North America, are Phillip F. Schewe's main subjects in The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of Our Electrified World. Phillip Schewe holds a Ph.D. in particle physics and is the Chief Science Writer for the American Institute of Physics. He has written for numerous national magazines and newspapers. When not engaged in research or scholarly writing, the author is an accomplished playwright whose plays have been staged in New York and Washington, D.C. The modern Grid is the industrial age’s greatest achievement, and Schewe has tried to explain how people in the modern world have come to take it for granted. In this book, he has brought

Schewe compels the audience to think about how it would feel to be in a situation where elevators and subways suddenly stopped working, people are forced to sit in darkness in homes and offices with no televisions, computers, or air conditioning. It was both interesting and scary to read about how as many as 50 million people took electricity for granted before the backout, and still continue to do so, because of how prevalent it has been in our lives. He explains how we have always taken electricity for granted, just like “the air we breathe”. But after all the hardships caused because of the Blackout, people started to think about how and why electricity should not be taken for granted. Schewe has done a wonderful job of educating his audience of complicated theories and terminology of electricity by breaking them down, and using very colorful comparisons and metaphors. For example, he describes how the presence of charge in electricity could spread itself miles away, “like tasting the tartness of a lemon without having the lemon”. He explains to us how important Thoreau, poets and historians are as well, as they have helped us to tell us what our technology