"Timeless Thomas," by Gene Barretta If you've had about enough of your 8-year-old's experiments - of wiping up food coloring, tossing broken toy parts haphazardly realigned, and mopping up the pungent vestiges of a vinegar and baking soda volcano - then crack open Gene Barretta's new biography of Thomas Edison. "Thomas Alva Edison began experimenting when he was just a boy," the author-illustrator begins brightly, adding, for those who might doubt the capacity of boys: "That's right." And nobody complained about the mess. As Barretta makes clear in "Timeless Thomas," Edison also made mistakes and suffered his share of failure. Here the finger is gently pointed at children who give up too easily. But this accessible and informative account, a worthy successor to Barretta's other men-and-ideas books ("Now & Ben: The Modern Inventions of Benjamin Franklin," "Neo Leo: The Ageless Ideas of Leonardo da Vinci"), is mostly about Edison's many great successes and their enduring presence in everyone's, including children's, lives today. "Timeless Thomas" is, in fact, almost entirely devoted to a series of opposing pages showing, on the one side, familiar modern technologies under the heading "Present Day" and, under "Edison's Lab" on the other, how Edison made what he did. Thanks to these adroit renderings, what could seem creaky 100-plus-year-old "Eureka!"s become relevant to young readers accustomed to instantaneous technology upgrades available on their iPhones. The "Edison's Lab" pages also effectively explain, through simple diagrams, how some of Edison's inventions actually worked. This reader, at least, understood the basic concept of the phonograph for the first time, um, ever. More obscure inventions are also introduced and explained. Did you know, for example, that Edison invented the electric pen, a forerunner to both the photocopier and the tattoo needle? Maybe children don't need to see this one. What the book lacks is some background information. It would be helpful to know how he came up with each invention. And the dates of each might appear along with the illustration instead of being confined to a couple of pages in the back. The narrative doesn't actually tell us when Edison was born. At the same time, Barretta's approach minimizes the clutter, and his overall organization (by invention rather than life event), makes the book especially user-friendly for young readers, to whom the dates won't mean much anyway. The lively illustrations, with spots of humor, help bring the more technical material down to child's-eye level. An especially nice touch is an endnote on Edison's employees, showing that even great minds benefit from collaboration, or from little helping hands.