Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia by Stephen J. Pyne

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420 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE house fastens on the hot rod and its subculture as a source of community, learning, craftsmanship, involvement, and creativity. This theme is developed systematically only in one subsequent chapter. The bulk of the text is devoted to a history of hot rodding that covers such topics as pre-World War II timing runs on the dry lakes of Southern California, the role of Hot Rod magazine and the closely associated National Hot Rod Association in promoting hot rodding as a safe and legitimate activity, the growth of a speed equipment industry and the challenge posed to it by clean-air legislation, the controversy over the use of nitromethane fuels for competition dragsters, women’s accomplishments within the sport, and sundry other matters. These chapters constitute a thoroughly competent narrative of the development of hot rodding, but contrib­ ute only marginally to the issues introduced in the first chapter. This lack of fit between the theoretical concerns initially addressed and the bulk of the book’s content is Driving Ambitions’ greatest shortcoming. Most readers attracted to the sociological issues intro­ duced in the opening chapter will have little interest in the contro­ versy over the use of exotic fuels by dragsters, while those interested in hot rodding per se will find the theoretical orientations at best irrelevant and at worst incomprehensible. The conceptual shortcomings of the book are exacerbated by shoddy production. The mangled spelling of many Southern Califor­ nia place names is perhaps excusable; the numerous misspellings of common words less so. Even worse, flawed typesetting and editing have rendered some lines incoherent. And one wonders whether there is ironic intent in the dustjacket illustration, the front end of a 1946-48 Plymouth—one of the coldest rods of the postwar era. Many of us would agree with the author’s contention that “The car on road or track, in garage or museum, on strip or in salesroom remains virtual terra incognita to the academic mind” (p. 221). Despite excessive wheelspin and too many missed shifts, Driving Ambitions provides a useful and sympathetic examination of an often misunderstood branch of the automotive culture. Rudi Volti Dr. Volti is professor of sociology at Pitzer College, where his course offerings include “Cars and Culture.” Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia. By Stephen J. Pyne. New York: Henry Holt, 1991. Pp. xiv + 520; illustrations, notes, bibliog­ raphy, index. $27.95. Historians interested in technology and society should find this book’s novel approach instructive, even if they are not interested in fire, for Stephen Pyne treats skillfully a subject not normally thought TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 421 of as historical or as part of human cultures. In doing so he uses knowledge from many disciplines. Beginning with geology and the drifting of proto-Australia among the fragments of Gondwana, he continues with natural history, then anthropology, then agricultural history, ending with the scientific and administrative history of fire in an industrial society. Science, first a tool to examine fire, is itself scrutinized as a developing body of knowledge. Fire appears as a natural phenomenon, a part of the ecosystems of Australia, and also as a technology wielded in different ways by the human cultures of the continent. The book has four sections, the dominant “fire regimes” serving as division points. First came natural fire. Over millions of years the interaction of climate, primeval vegetation, and fire produced a flora dominated by the pyrophilic eucalypts—which in turn affected fire in the bush. Technology and culture enter in the second section, on aboriginal fire. The first inhabitants, “firestick farmers,” burned constantly, carelessly, and extensively. They used fire to shape the land and get their food, and fire, in turn, shaped their culture and their lives. The last two sections, some 60 percent of the book, deal with the whites’ fire regimes. The settlers’ practices, ways of burning compat­ ible with their crops and flocks and buildings, Pyne calls “European fire.” They further changed the land, but the tinderbox that was the bush had its own dynamic, and the conditions the settlers found and then produced led to disastrous fires in 1939. The Australians’ response was to...