Ballpoint

Book excerpt: The triumphs and the trials of the men who invented the modern ballpoint pen as they battled corporate greed, dark eras--and each other. Laszlo Biro's last name is, in much of the world, a synonym for his revolutionary writing tool. But few people know that Biro began his career in interwar Budapest as a journalist frustrated with spotty ink; that he escaped fascism by fleeing to Paris and, finally, to Buenos Aires; that a fellow Hungarian, Andor Goy, also played a vital role in the pen's development--and that, in a tragic twist of shared fate, business pressures and politics ultimately deprived both men of their rights to the ballpoint pen. Taking us from Hitler's Europe in 1938, to Argentina, where Biro settled, and to Communist-era Hungary, where Goy lived out his life, "Ballpoint" is a painstakingly researched, absorbing narrative that reads simultaneously like a work of history and a novel.