258 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ical survey of recorded sound technology and musical culture in America. Emily Thompson Dr. Thompson teaches the history of technology at the University of Pennsylvania. Before becoming a historian, she worked as a sound engineer and producer at the Eastman School of Music and at WQED-FM in Pittsburgh. She is the author of “Ma chines, Music and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925,” Musical Quarterly 19 (Spring 1995): 131-71. Henry Ford: Mass Production, Modernism and Design. By Ray Batchelor. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp. x+150; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $69.95 (hard cover) . In this volume, Ray Batchelor seeks to throw light on the lives of contemporary inhabitants of the industrial world by considering the massive and multifaceted impact upon thatworld ofHenry Ford and the mass production system he perfected. Each of the five chapters of this stimulating marriage of industrial history and cultural criti cism could stand alone as an essay. The first two explore the myths and realities surrounding the life of Henry Ford and the history of the mass production system he perfected. The next two describe the impact of Fordist mass production upon carmaking practices here and abroad and upon design ideas until the 1960s. The final essay examines the roles mass production ideologies and the presence of mass-produced artifacts in everyday life played in the shift from high modernist to postmodernist worldviews during the past forty years. Batchelor carefully chooses his case studies and examples, includ ing the frequent illustrations. Many Technology and Culture readers will find his work valuable for its overview of significant strands of 20th century technological and design history, and for its challenges to any simple story of triumphant Fordist assembly lines and Bauhaus design doctrine. Readers unfamiliar with the story of Henry Ford will gain an overview of the quick rise and fall of Ford’s particu lar brand of single-product mass production system, and will learn of the major problems encountered in attempting to export pure Fordist practice to factories in Europe. Readers unfamiliar with the story of design in this century will follow the streamline/high mod ernist strand of that story and will learn that products supposedly designed to exemplify the spirit of the age of Fordist industry often needed the old craft techniques in their actual manufacture. All readers will put down this book having been exposed to a series of short, challenging cultural critiques attached to concrete case stud ies, products, and built environments. For instance, the author begins and ends his volume with a look at Greenfield Village, Henry Ford’s selective recreation of his boyhood TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 259 world of small farms, shops, and manufactories. The first chapter, “The Modern American folk hero,” uses a description of the village as a springboard to a discussion of Henry Ford as a paradoxical mythic figure. Ford appears both as the larger-than-life perfecter of a mass production system which powerfully transforms the America of his youth, and as the larger-than-life exemplar and lamenter of a bygone age which depended not upon vast, intricate manufactur ing and control systems, but upon the pluck and brains of men like Henry himself. The final chapter, “Mass production, design, and us,” closes with a return to Greenfield Village. The Village nowjoins other efforts to undermine the standardizations imposed from so many sources upon citizens of late-20th-century industrialized soci ety. “In the Modern World,” argues Batchelor, “we must create, to define some aspects ofwho we think we are” (p. 142). In asurprising turn, Greenfield Village has become not a pastiche assembled by Henry Ford, the cranky mourner after the world he destroyed, but an environment providing a sense of identity for Henry Ford, the proto-postmodernist celebrator of an alternative worldview. This summary of Batchelor’s use of Greenfield Village scarcely does justice to the subtlety of his analyses, but it does indicate the passionate concern for the dignity and liberty of individual humans which underlies his arguments. He rejects not only the dehumaniz ing practices of mass production regimes, but...