This is a very curious little encyclopaedia. Its editor comes from Pitzer College, and most of the fairly short list of contributors also appear to work at minor American universities. With its black‐and‐white illustrations and its general air of breezy optimism it has an oddly dated, 1950s feel to it. In fact I am sure that I had a copy of the same full‐page picture of the Hoover Dam in a book called something like The Wonder Book for Boys, given to me by my granny when I was about ten.
There isn’t even so much as a mention of a version of this being available on an interactive CD. It is quite some time since I came across a new popular work based on the assumption that science and technology can solve problems rather than create them.
The study of the interrelationship between technology and society is, by now, a well‐recognised academic discipline. There are numerous encyclopaedias of technology, of various sorts, both those aimed at the lay reader and those aimed at the technological specialist, and, of course, there are numerous encyclopaedias of the social sciences. This, however, is basically an encyclopaedia of technology aimed at the social scientist. All the entries appear to me to be comprehensible to the reasonably well‐educated sixth‐former or humanities/social science undergraduate. Spellings are, of course, American. Weights and measures are usually given in both American and metric forms (but not Imperial ‐ so liquids are referred to in litres and US gallons only, and they manage to get into a tangle between the US short ton, the Imperial long ton, and the metric tonne).
The alphabetical order chosen is a bit peculiar. Thus, for example, there is some useful information on iron working under Iron, wrought, but then some more under Cast iron. It is impossible to solve this problem completely in a printed encyclopaedia, but a little more attention to consistency might have made the book even easier to use. The cross‐referencing partly makes up for this, although, for example, there is no cross‐ reference from Genetics, Mendelian to Human genome project. On the whole, however, I would be happy to recommend this as a good basic reference text. Libraries catering for schools or for colleges with a wide range of undergraduate courses will need a large basic general encyclopaedia first and foremost, and specialised reference books for the particular subjects they study, but could well consider this as a useful third choice, to supplement these.
