TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 543 Energy and the Federal Government: Fossil Fuel Policies, 1900—1946. By John G. Clark. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. xxiii + 511; tables, notes, index. $39.95. At the turn of the 20th century, knowledgeable laymen in the United States recognized that a transition had taken place from wood to coal as the dominant fuel among utilized energy sources. Coal provided over 70 percent of the rapidly industrialized nation’s energy needs by the time it peaked in the second decade of the 20th century. By then, and even though coal’s predominance lasted into the 1940s, other mineral fuels that had come on the scene since the last third of the 19th century challenged fast. The discovery of large domestic supplies of petroleum and natural gas, coupled with the development of the technology to exploit them, set the stage for the tale told in this book. How these fuels would be developed, distributed, and sold in America’s free-market economy and the role the United States government increasingly played in determining energy policy within the nebulous context of the term “national interest” is a historical maze. Energy historian John G. Clark guides the reader into the intricacies of this policy development through prodigious research in untapped and little-used sources, knowledgeable use of the secondary literature, and careful writing. This work should serve as a standard on the subject for some time. By traversing the period 1900—1946, Clark takes into account three major crises that greatly involved the government in the affairs of the energy companies—the two world wars and the Great Depression. That eight of his fifteen chapters discuss energy policy development during those important epochs tells us much about the influence ofthe government during times ofnational stress. Furthermore, Clark shows how the government attempted to set policy, even in better times, amid forces over which it often had little or no control. Indeed, he concludes that federal policies toward these fuels during the whole period was “unsystematic, vague, and eminently minimal” (p. 381). The impor tant reason for this, which comes through strongly in the book, is the constant play between competing interests within each ofthe fossil-fuel industries as well as the natural competition among them. It is little wonder, then, that the federal government had a difficult time at tempting to make policies that more often amounted to conducting a brokering operation among energy competitors. Clark’s story reminds the reader also that the government itselfis an institution with internal competing interests. Turf control, agency jealousies, competing bud gets, and occasional large personal egos made policy setting and im plementation a difficult if not impossible task. There are no heroes in this book. One person who receives a great deal ofattention is Secretary ofthe Interior Harold L. Ickes. I detected a bit of admiration for him by Clark. Ickes was a longtime and im portant player, not simply because he held a key office during the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 544 Book Reviews back-to-back crises ofthe Great Depression and the Second World War. His various attempts to fashion energy policy in the rapidly expanding federal bureaucracy of that time is a fascinating part of Clark’s study. Energy and the Federal Government is an important work that should be a required reference for specialists in government policy, technol ogists in the energy community, and scholars who have an interest in the area of energy development and policy. George T. Mazuzan Dr. Mazuzan is the National Science Foundation historian. The Beginnings ofthe Use ofMetals and Alloys. Edited by Robert Maddin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Pp. xiv + 393; illustrations, tables, references, index. $55.00. The Beginnings of the Use ofMetals and Allays represents the proceed ings of the second international conference on the subject (BUMA-II) held in Zhengzhou, China, in 1986. It includes twenty-seven of the thirty-six papers presented there (adequate translations of the nine Chinese contributions could not be obtained in time for publication) and three others from the 1981 BUMA-I conference. The authors, an international group of scholars (fourteen countries represented), treat early metallurgical developments in a diverse array...