| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. By Giles Slade. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 330 pp. Notes and index. Paper $15.95.

If Giles Slade's argument is to be believed, nearly everything Americans have manufactured over the past fifty years has been "made to break." Concepts like planned obsolescence have created a throwaway culture whose legacy is giant pyramids of toxic waste. Cars, razor blades, radios, computers, and even weapons, Slade asserts, have been deliberately engineered to fail or become unfashionable before they have worn out, all because "a century of advertising has conditioned us to want more, better, and faster from any consumer goods we purchase" (p. 1).

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