Like the 1,093 patents that Thomas Edison secured during his lifetime — still the American record — the number of biographies of the fabled inventor now nears Brobdingnagian proportions. So many scholars have attempted to capture the life and times of every fifth grader’s favorite scientist that even the subtitles overlap. In 1995, Neil Baldwin published “Edison: Inventing the Century.” Now Randall Stross has written “The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World” (Crown, 384 pages, $24.95). Mr. Stross, who writes the “Digital Domain” column for the New York Times, argues that Edison was “the first celebrity of the modern age,” and this “major reinterpretation” purports to offer both a “fuller view” of Edison and also consider “the application of celebrity to business.” The result, while comprehensive and meticulously researched, is a turbid, desultory rendering of a twice-told tale.

Although Mr. Stross begins his story when Edison is already 22 years old and settling into life as an unfettered inventor of all things gizmo, he nonetheless manages to hit every scenic overview along Edison highway. Thus we learn — or, rather, are reminded — of Edison’s premature hearing loss; the conflagration in his ad-hoc chemistry lab aboard a working train; his early successes in telegraphy; his accidental invention of the phonograph; his perfection of the incandescent light bulb; his friendship with Henry Ford; his development of the kinetoscope; and his protracted, consternating twilight years, when he repeatedly failed to re-create the magic that had made him “the nation’s superinventor nonpareil.”

Mr. Stross’s Edison is a man of opposition: steadfast yet duplicitous, pugnacious yet unflappable, dedicated yet unfocused, pedestrian yet disdainful of “trash” music. Edison, renown for working long hours, was nevertheless derided for consistently meting out arduous assignments to lab workers in the late afternoon, before retiring for the evening. After his assistants toiled until dawn, Edison “would arise, have a good breakfast, and exclaim, ‘What a wonderful night’s work I have done.'”

It remains unclear whom exactly Mr. Stross thinks deserves credit for Edison’s fame and, more importantly, if Edison was in fact the first modern celebrity, why that matters. He explains that, after Scientific American published a preview of Edison’s phonograph, “Edison would never again enjoy the sweetness of anonymous obscurity.” (Disregard the tautology.) After this serendipitous event, Mr. Stross contends, Edison “intuitively cultivated the relationships, using the press’s hunger for more sensational discoveries for his own ends.”

Mr. Stross’s argument, engorged with contradictions, claims that Edison was both deftly “parting the curtain only enough to provide a glimpse of what he had actually achieved” and also pitifully waging public relations campaigns that were neither “the product of grandiosity” nor dealt “with a master’s touch.” “He once again invited members of the press to his laboratory,” Mr. Stross writes, but when the “ambivalent” Edison battled for his incandescent bulbs to be installed in Manhattan, instead of the older, far-too-bright arc lights, it was only as “the reluctant participant in a contest of marketing strategies.”

Mr. Stross, who also teaches business at San José State University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and whose previous books have dealt with Steve Jobs and eBay, seems most comfortable when describing Edison’s convoluted business arrangements. Edison’s many companies included the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, the Edison Electric Light Company, the Edison Storage Battery Company, the Edison Portland Cement Company, and the Edison Botanic Research Company. None of these entities, as such, exist today, and it makes sense that a business professor would focus on a man whose ineptitude in business was nearly as famous as his perspicacity in invention.

Unlike Mr. Jobs and the founders of eBay, Edison habitually missed or ignored pivotal business opportunities, and while he died a millionaire, the value of his estate was minuscule compared to what it could have been. Edison squandered millions on quixotic crusades into low-grade iron ore, alternative sources of rubber, and electric cars. In describing these events, Mr. Stross sprinkles his prose with such B-school terms as “vertical integration,” “client firms,” and “start-up.” One unlucky sentence juxtaposes “pricing schemes,” “high-volume residential use,” and “optimize the greatest volume.” Although Mr. Stross holds a Ph.D in history from Stanford University, his story lacks historical context, referring only cursorily to World War I, influenza, and the 1929 stock market crash.

In order to “reinterpret” a historical subject some previously undiscovered element must vouchsafe deeper insight into the subject’s animating spirit. Mr. Stross appears to lack such an element, but in his defense, Edison seems to have left few, if any, rocks to overturn. Mr. Stross repeatedly informs us, always with a sigh, that the surviving documents reveal little of Edison’s feelings on personal matters. His attempts to explore the premature death of Edison’s first wife, the alcoholic demise of his first-born son, his second marriage to the 20-year-old Mina Miller, his atheism, and his “hateful prejudices” (the evidence, unlike that against Henry Ford, is thin) prove bootless. Edison was neither a letter writer nor a memoirist nor an autobiographer nor even much of a talker. Family members conspire in the mystery. What was life like with a famous dad? “It didn’t feel like anything,” Edison’s daughter, Madeleine, said before her death in 1979.

Perhaps this is why, even as biographies bemoan the reduction, Edison remains co-opted by fifth graders. The soul of a man who kept only lab reports and patent filings is eternally imprisoned by folklore.

Mr. Peed is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker.