I bought this book because I thought it would be "a magical history of the quest for mechanical life." I'm very fascinated with automata, and I figured this book would be an good overview of the history and perhaps some nice objective insight. Unfortunately, a great deal of the book it wasted on the author's questionable conjecture. She seems convinced that a lot of automatons were created in an effort to make the perfect woman. It's a point I found farfetched and it seemed to be reiterated far too often, giving it the flavor of some weird feminist propoganda. The author does, however, make some interesting points on the implications of artificial life.
I found The actual history covered in the book to be a bit lacking; there is a lot of automata history that isn't even touched.

I think this subject deserved a better suited author. I eventually became too tired of the author's speculations to even finish the last couple chapters (not that I'd want to read about the doll family anyways.)

In the end, I feel this book should sport a different title. Perhaps: "Edison's Eve: The Strange Psychology of the Quest for the Perfect Woman." ( )

Like another reviewer, I found the inclusion of the large final chapter on the doll family very jarring, surely two books have got mixed up together? I also found the chapter on the mechanical turk a bit derivative of Standage's book, so if you know his, you are unlikely to know any more from this book. Also the coverage was a bit uncertain. Why not cover Hellenistic automata? Still Wood's pop-psychology theories on why automata are so fascinating yet repellant made interesting reading for me. The chapter on Vaucanson's Duck was good.
Overall a patchy book, but it still sits on my shelf, so I am planning on reading it again one day. ( )

This is a not too bad book that ended up annoying me a great deal. The author starts out discussing various famous automata of the 18th century, some of which were not fakes, and some of which, like the chess-playing Turk, were. She dwells on the discomfort people felt at these machines which appeared to present living beings, as well as on the technical developments behind them and the scientific fascination with life processes they were part of. She progresses into the equipment and tricks used by 19th century stage magicians, which leads her to Georges Méliès, who took over the stage equipment of the magician Robert-Houdin, before becoming one of the first of the great early film directors and producers. This doesn't seem too far-fetched, since Méliès' work is marked by the use of mechanical means to convey illusions--but then, having decided to leap into the world of film, she spends the last large section of the book covering the history of the Doll Family, a family of dwarf circus performers who had intermittent careers in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s. (Although any author who takes advantage of the opportunity to include the chant from the movie Freaks*, as Harry Earles, one of the Doll Family, played the lead in that film, probably deserves some slack.) Despite some effort on Woods' parts to try and connect the unease felt by many in relation to robots and automata to the unease many feel towards dwarfs and other physically abnormal humans, I finished that part of the book with the feeling that she was first of all a fan of the Doll Family, and wanted to get something about them in print somewhere but couldn't sell a book about them, and secondly that she was running out of material and needed to throw something in to appease her editor. This annoyed me, although the Doll Family deserve to have their history recounted somewhere by someone. As a piece of sleight of hand, this wasn't worthy of the stage magicians Woods writes about elsewhere in the book.

I wouldn't say "Don't waste your time with this one"; there are interesting things in the book, and Woods does present some ideas worth considering and some interesting bits of history. However, you, too, may find the book irritating for the same reasons I did. Then again, you may not.

*"Gooble, gobble! gooble, gobble! We accept you! We accept you! One of us! One of us!"
You knew that, right?