| VISIONS OF TECHNOLOGY A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human World Richard Rhodes New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-84971-336-8 | ||||
| ISBN 0-684-83903-2 | 399pp. | HC/BWI | $30.00 | |
Wow! What a gold mine! "A vast wasteland". "Too cheap to meter". This book is a treasure trove of short essays on technology collected from all across the Twentieth Century. Who would have guessed that the source texts for those two well-known phrases quoted above, and many others, would be collected between the pages of a single volume? Not I, or not me.1
The majority of the selections are quite short, a page or two; some are only a paragraph, one or two sentences. There are poems and parodies of poems, a song by Loretta Lynn, lists and letters, an excerpt from a play. There are diagrams and drawings, graphs and photographs. And there is this mind-boggling quotation from U.S. Congressman James G. Fulton:
| Page 208: | Possibly in space the approach to vegetables might be different. Did that ever strike you—because we are thinking of three-dimensional vegetables, maybe in space, where you have a lot of sunlight, you might get a two-dimensional tomato. It might be one million miles long and as thin as a sheet of paper, aimed toward the sun—a tomato. |
The collection is divided into four time periods:
A bibliography and an index follow these.
There are pearls of humor and gems of wisdom in this book. It truly belongs in everyone's library.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.