TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 133 reversed” (p. ix). Because of the growing complexity of material culture in the 19th century stimulated by the enormous growth of separate innovations or discoveries, Pounds chose to cut off his discussion at the middle of the century. Students of archaeology, geography, technology, architecture, and many other fields will, I suspect, be impressed with Pounds’s ability to integrate data from their disciplines into this effort to see human development in terms of material culture. Whether dealing with a Neolithic wagon, a Paleolithic hut, a Roman city plan, a Swiss moun tain valley settlement, a Polish flail, or a medieval key, Pounds successfully places material culture in the context of eating, sleeping, traveling, farming, fighting, and other human activities, and puts such activities, in turn, in the context of theories of how cultures adapted to the challenges of the environment, of disease, of population growth, and of war. In sum, Hearth and Home should be of interest to all members of the Society for the History of Technology, for it demonstrates a sophisti cated understanding of the history of technology and its relations with culture and society. Beyond that, Pounds helps define and elevate the sometimes confused and unappreciated subject of material culture, a term that is too often shunned by students of the history of technology. Wilcomb E. Washburn Dr. Washburn is director of the Office of American Studies at the Smithsonian Institution and directs a graduate program in material aspects of American civilization in cooperation with participating universities. The Material of Invention: Materials and Design. By Ezio Manzini. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Pp. 255; illustrations, glossary, appendix, bibliography. $45.00. This Italian book first appeared in an English translation in 1986, and the MIT Press began to distribute it in 1989, presumably to reach a wider audience. It is a handsome, lavishly illustrated, coffee-tablesized work that attempts to appeal to a readership ranging from ordinary consumers curious about the interaction between materials and design in the objects around them to the architect or industrial designer seeking a provocative survey of the possibilities posed by novel materials. The relationship between materials and design is the unambiguous focus of this work, but within that focus Ezio Manzini ranges over a large and eclectic territory. The objects within his purview extend from airports to running shoes, and the materials from wood to liquid crystals. Even more striking, however, is the range of thought that these subjects evoke. Specific objects and uses of materials are 134 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE analyzed with care, whether they be the plastic wrapping around hams at the supermarket, the insulating tiles on the space shuttle, or a Swatch watch. Woven intimately with such specific topics, however, are philosophical ruminations on everything from “transparency” to “creativity.” The book’s organization is an attempt to provide some structure to this wide-ranging exploration. Manzini begins with several chapters defining the broad issues raised by the relation between materials and design. How do we experience materials? How do we distinguish different materials? How are our approaches and feelings about ma terials changed by new technologies? Following this, he focuses on three “families” of materials—plastics, metals, and composites—where his interest in the implications of recent innovations becomes clear. Then, in the section that is actually half of the entire book, Manzini talks about “Playing with the Possible,” how the growing capability to create materials with very specific combinations of properties allows the designer a range of choices never before available. He focuses on such properties as lightness, heat resistance, elasticity, transparency, and various surface textures. Some of the implications of this new freedom are illustrated in the book’s final section, a free-ranging (and sometimes bizarre) display of “exercises in innovation” by about two dozen product designers (almost all Italian). The unrestrained use of illustrations, in both black and white and color, and the adoption of distinctive typography to separate general discussions from more technical ones break up the text so thoroughly that each page becomes an adventure in both verbal and visual literacy. Like many adventures, this can be exciting at the outset, a challenge to established...