The lack of endnote signifiers in the text annoyed the academic in me, but I was not surprised to detect some tactics richly practiced by soap opera scriptwriters, who truly know how to hold their audiences: repeated foretelling and rehashing the same event from differing viewpoints. The crisis that propelled the Priestleys out of Europe to what was then an English colony comes as rather a letdown after all the buildup.
Certainly, the story of Priestley's life is interesting and well told and probably not unknown to experts in the fields touched by his work, but ordinary readers may be put off by the excursions into theories like energy flow and dialectics. I am not sure that the one does not do disservice to the other. Time will tell.
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