Synopsis
Ranging from the Stone Age to the birth of Silicon Valley, the author demonstrates the way in which the discovery, application, and adaptation of materials have shaped the course of human history and the routines of our daily existence.
Reviews
Although the author and his publisher committed the unforgivable sin of omitting an index, The Substance of Civilization indeed contains much of substance and is a good starting place to develop an appreciation for the history and nature of materials science.
Remember when you learned about the Stone Age, followed by Bronze and Iron? Well, it didn't exactly stop there, and Sass, a Cornell materials-science professor, is our guide to all the successive wonders of luck, pluck, and technology that have enabled us to move from cave days to today's steel-polyethylene-and-silicon world. Moving chronologically, with some time out to explain what makes metal metal or introduce notions like yield strength, plastic deformation, and dislocations, Sass treats the reader to a materials-science course for the layperson, laced with lots of didja-knows: Did you know that smelting copper often meant releasing toxic arsenic gas, which is probably why Hephaestus in the Iliad is described as lame? That ``carat'' comes from the Greek keration, for locust-pod tree, because the dried pod nearly always weighed 200 milligrams (now the standard)? In short, there are gobs of wonderful trivia as well as accounts of the technological innovations that led to ever hotter furnaces, blown glass, steel from iron, and all the latter-day wonders, from synthetic rubber, celluloid, and rayon to aluminum alloys, Kevlar, plastics, silicon chips, and composites. How each of these material discoveries and inventions affected society is an important subtextbut the point of view is largely apolitical. (The reader will infer that building bigger and better arms, however, has clearly been a strong motivating force for material invention.) Sass is not always successful in getting the reader over technological hurdles; there are pages of photos (unseen), but the text could surely use diagrams as well. What he doesand does wellis convey the richness of the material world and the ingenuity of humankind in making use of it. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The word civilization brings images of the pyramids of Egypt, Greek temples, or great libraries and museums to mind, monumental structures that not only reflect idealized social order but offer evidence to support Sass' claim that "materials guided the course of history." None of these awe-inspiring constructions or their contents would have been possible without the ingenious manipulation of raw materials. The symbiotic relationship between the shape of culture and the evolution of technology is acknowledged in terms such as the Bronze Age, and Sass, a professor at Cornell University and a writer of both affability and precision, bridges the divide between history and science as he explains the unique properties of such key substances as clay, iron, glass, polymers, and silicon, and how they have affected every aspect of civilization from warfare to religion, politics, education, art, and economics. Noting the direct correlation between the complexity of any given society and the sophistication of the materials it uses, Sass provides diverse and illuminating examples with unflagging and infectious enthusiasm. Donna Seaman
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