Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell by Charlotte Gray (2004; 445 pages) is an in-depth history of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone and the founding of AT&T in 1885. It’s also a window into education of the deaf community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Alexander’s father devoted his career as a speech consultant (elocutionist) who developed the Visible Speech System, a series of symbols representing pronunciation. Alexander followed in his father’s footsteps but charted his own path as a teacher of deaf students, one of whom was Helen Keller. Alexander married one of his deaf students and the book is also a beautiful love story about their marriage.