Technology's Crux: AtD days

Monte Davis monte.davis at bms.com
Mon Apr 2 08:16:23 CDT 2007


There goes the book budget for this month. I'm familiar with Vaclav Smil 
primarily as a geo-eco-chemist, tracing global environmental cycling of 
nitrogen, carbon, etc. But these two books look irresistible, and would 
surely provide lots of grist for any Stencil -- looking into the late 
nineteenth century for When it All Went Off the Rails:

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/54755

The review includes a wonderfuil passage from a Henry Adams letter:

"A world so different from that of my childhood or middle-life can't 
belong to the same scheme. It shifts from one motive to another, without 
sequence. . . . Out of a medieval, primitive, crawling infant of 1838, 
to find oneself a howling, steaming, exploding, Marconiing, radiumating, 
automobiling maniac of 1904 exceeds belief."



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