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Short Takes
Short Takes is an occasional compendium of brief reviews prepared by the Book Review Editor. It focuses on publications that may have some interest to IA readers but will not be given full-length reviews because (1) they have marginal interest to most of our readers, or (2) they are subsequent editions of books reviewed earlier by the journal, or (3) the book review editor failed to find a reviewer for the volume after several attempts.
The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology. By Carroll Pursell. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2nd ed., 2007. xvi+398 pp., illus., notes, bibl., index. $55 hb (ISBN 0-8018-8578-7); $22.95 pb (ISBN 0-8018-8579-5).
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Pursell's The Machine in America originally appeared in 1995. The following year a favorable review of the volume appeared in IA, v. 22, no. 2, pp. 75–76. In the dozen years since its first appearance, Pursell's survey of the history of American technology has been one of the most widely used introductions to the subject in classes designed for undergraduate students and is used in some graduate classes as well. For that reason, the appearance of a second edition deserves at least a brief notice. The Machine in America has been enduring for multiple reasons, including its solid prose, excellent illustrations and captions, use of current themes (gender, race, class), focus on how society constructs technology, and a critical view of technology as something that historically has been used in America, all too often, to reinforce the powerful rather than help the weak.
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| The second edition's most glaring shortcoming is the absence of an author's introduction explaining how this edition differs from the previous one. A publisher's blurb on the back of the paperback edition informs the reader that "Pursell brings this classic history up-to-date with a revised chapter on war technology and new discussions on information technology, globalization, and the environment." Pursell also very clearly updated the Further Reading section at the back of the volume, for it contains numerous post-1995 works. An introduction to the new edition, outlining what had changed and why, might have encouraged some of us who still have the first edition to consider purchasing the second. |
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