712 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of these vehicles, Wakefield has worked hard to collect relevant infor mation about how the early electrics actually performed. For those interested in such matters, his data on early curb weights, battery complements, and control mechanisms will also be of considerable interest. And in the discussion of the post-1965 period, Wakefield has brought together technical specifications and pictures of literally dozens of prototype and limited-production vehicles, including such oddities as the Centennial, a purpose-built electric car commissioned in honor of the 100th anniversary of General Electric, and the Cin derella, an electric surrey built in Mexico in the late 1970s for use at exclusive resorts and private estates. In sum, however, this book is disappointing. Wakefield does not explore the linkages between technology and culture in depth, leav ing himself with no choice but to shoehorn his hopes for the future of electric vehicles into a traditional, internalist, deterministic account of technological change. David A. Kirsch Mr. Kirsch is a doctoral candidate in history of technology at Stanford University. His dissertation examines the general problem of technological competition, using as a case study the history and economics of the battle in the U.S. between steam-, gas-, and electric-powered automobiles from 1890 to 1914. The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time. By Graeme Davison. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. viii-l-160; illustrations, notes, index. $18.95 (paper). The Unforgiving Minute, a slender volume on the concept of time in Australia, will be of marginal interest to historians of technology. Graeme Davison, a professor of history at Melbourne’s Monash Uni versity, takes a broad approach to time. His work appears in a series of volumes sponsored by Oxford University Press which examine “informative issues in . . . [Australia’s] national history in a style acces sible to non-specialists.” Davison’s major emphasis is on time as a sociological and cultural phenomenon. While the book is allegedly written for the average educated Australian, its style and content indicate that it is actually aimed at the trendy academic left. Thus, the author quotes liberally from E. P. Thompson and Karl Marx (pp. 4, 13, 3, 50, 146) and also has the occasional reference to sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, a name that would be unrecognizable by well over 99 percent of educated Australians (pp. 3, 101). The volume starts with a short, politically correct bow to Australia’s aboriginal people and their concept of time. It then moves on to discuss how Australia’s first white settlers, the convicts, and then the pastoralists and finally town folk, utilized or did not utilize a rigid time framework. Australia is a young country founded in 1788; it quickly became famous for its agricultural and mineral exports. How TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 713 ever, by the 1880s it was one of the world’s most urbanized societies. Indeed, most people lived and worked in one of the continent’s six large capital cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, and Hobart) or in a number of large provincial towns such as Ben digo, Ballarat, and Newcastle. Australia also quickly developed a mas sive transportation infrastructure that saw most of the capital cities and provincial towns linked by state-owned railroads. Interestingly, Australians were slow to adopt a formal standard time and Davison’s book makes it clear that, within each colony, local towns and cities adopted different times that fixed noon as the moment when the sun was directly overhead. These local times apparently governed the movement of people within cities and influenced the beginning and quitting times at factories and business establishments. Australia’s railway network, which began in the 1850s, quickly found it necessary (as did American railroads) to adopt some kind of standard time to govern train movement. Australia’s railroad devel opment was quite different from that in the United States. America in the 19th century had hundreds of railroad corporations, most of which were privately owned. In contrast, Australia had a few short, private railways, but nearly all of the significant development was undertaken by six large, state-owned railways in the six colonies (New South...