TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 953 theoretical justifications for either position. Moreover, even if one accepts Lazonick’s argument that large firms are themselves the product of innovative strategies, there is no reason to assume that such firms will continue to innovate in the future. Indeed, there is much in the literature to suggest otherwise. Naomi R. Lamoreaux Dr. Lamoreaux is professor of history at Brown University. She is the author of The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Insider Lending: Banks, Persona! Connections, and Economic Development m Industrial New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Mapping American Culture. Edited by Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Pp. vii + 310; illustrations, notes, index. $32.95. A recent volume in The American Land and Life Series, Mapping American Culture is a well-edited collection of eleven essays addressing the ways in which the concepts of space and place affect the American consciousness. Whether a fictional, now nearly mythical, setting, such as storyteller Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, or the all-too-real bomb-production sites of the Manhattan Project, place is shown in these essays to be a fundamental basis for understanding a national culture. The touchstone essay of the collection, “Place and Culture: Ana leptic for Individuality and the World’s Indifference,” by distin guished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan of the University of WisconsinMadison , is a lucid, philosophical exposition on the meaning of the words “place” and “culture.” For Tuan, identification with place and culture gives human beings a sense of order and belonging that helps to assuage the anxiety and alienation of modern life and that offsets the knowledge that nature is indifferent to the human condition. His essay introduces subsequent discussions of “inner geography,” or geography as it is experienced by the individual, in which Clarence Mondale of George Washington University and April Schultz of the University of Notre Dame examine the immigrant’s experience of changing place in the oral history of immigrant groups and in fiction, respectively. Also in the first topical grouping of essays is one by Ray Allen, a folklore consultant at the World Music Institute and Citylore in New York City. Allen traces the ties of migrant and northern-born African-American gospel singers to their “homeland” in the rural South and to a southern religious tradition. Of particular interest to historians of technology are two essays that address the built environments of large-scale technological projects. The first, “Topographies of Power,” is by Peter Bacon Hales of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The essay chronicles the origin, selection, and construction of the three sites for the Manhattan 954 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Project (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford) to reveal the coercive administration of the project and local resistance to it. With his “alternative history [of] the Manhattan Engineering District” (p. 252), Hales reevaluates the myth of the origin of atomic power by telling the story from the viewpoint of its effect on local residents, produc tion workers, and the immediate environment. The second essay, “Priesthood and Power,” by Steven Marx of California Polytechnic State University, is a sobering revelation on the meaning of “power” and who controls it. Marx lays bare the public relations packaging of a nuclear power project. Both essays zero in on the relationship between history, geography, and culture. Two other essays in Mapping American Culture implicitly address technology and culture. Timothy Davis of the University of Texas at Austin surveys the influence landscape photography has had on the image making of place. Richard Keller Simon of California Polytech nic deals with the major icon of consumer culture, the shopping mall, and how it can represent a modern version of an earlier, less technologically sophisticated, artificial construct, the garden. Also in the collection is a grouping of essays by Don Scheese of Santa Clara University, Kinereth Meyer of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Kath leen R. Wallace of the University of Minnesota. They explore lan guage, literature, and the meaning of place in American culture through Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, William Carlos Williams’s long poem Paterson, and...