Who would have thought that fireworks—spectacular displays designed to elicit fear, awe, admiration, and delight—occupied a central place in both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment? While it may not be surprising that the art of controlling explosions for visual effect drew on contemporary knowledge of chemistry (or alchemy) and mechanics, the principal claims of this ambitious book go much farther. Hunting down fireworks and fireworkers wherever he can find them, Simon Werrett sets out to uncover the complex of meanings, practices, and social identities populating a vast international pyrotechnic landscape, from a fifteenth-century German manuscript Feuerwerkbuch to the elaborate colored displays ignited to celebrate the marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte. To map what he calls the “geography of early modern art and science” (p. 135), Werrett trains his analytic gaze especially on three locations: London, Paris, and St. Petersburg. In the libraries and archives of each of these cities, abundant textual and visual evidence about centuries of fireworks underpins a comparative approach to the techniques, cultural meanings, audiences, and styles in the different kinds of displays mounted in the three capitals. The variety of venues is a great strength of the book, especially because it includes St. Petersburg, considerably less familiar in the history of science than London or Paris. Werrett started academic life as a scholar of science in Russia, and some of his most striking evidence comes from the images commemorating Russian spectacles, and from the archival sources that document the efforts of St. Petersburg academicians to use pyrotechnic experiments and expertise to enhance their status. The comparative framework of the book is only one element of a rather complex narrative, which tracks Italian fireworkers moving among European courts, tensions between gunners and architects, debates about theory and practice, and the intersection of performance and science in academies, courts, and public spaces.