432 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Catholic clergy and ethnic leaders in order to preserve their authority while accommodating the rise of unions. Labor activism did not separate Quebec-heritage workers from commitments to religious and cultural values, for the clergy’s adaptive use of American political language fostered creation of a rival “American identity” for workers, “anticapitalist but anticommunist, patriotic but parochial, militant but devout” (p. 195). Articulated as what Gerstle terms an “ethnic corpo ratism,” this ideology integrated well with the postwar political climate and served as the basis for displacing radical leadership. Yet its very parochialism doomed the union, for the new leadership rejected organizing ventures beyond textiles or Woonsocket as well as merger with national unions. When the city’s core industry collapsed in the 1950s, so too did the ITU. As interest in workplace dynamics and their cultural dimensions has grown among historians of technology in recent years, it is valuable to have Gerstle’s work as a complement to studies by Tamara Hareven, David Montgomery, and Ronald Schatz. We may also be grateful for the author’s fluid style and the ease with which he moves from close description to historiographical context and controversy. Yet, as with other studies in this vein, it is regrettable that issues of technological change fall generally into deep background or occa sional anecdote (pp. 322—23). The relevant tradejournals appear not to have been consulted, although local and union papers, federal records, and, most impressively, extensive interviewing contributed to an otherwise-sound resource base. Without attention to the industrial press, even the most finely crafted labor studies will continue to marginalize matters of technological change as a significant element in industrial and community history. Philip Scranton Dr. Scranton is professor of history at Rutgers University, Camden. He is presently working on a history of batch and custom production and American industrial flexibility, ca. 1870-1940. A Celebration of Work. By Norman Best. Edited by William G. Robbins. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Pp. xviii + 223; illus trations, notes. $19.95. The literature of American labor and work is sparse when dealing with first-hand, blue-collar expositions ofjob content. A plethora of documentation exists describing work as historians see it, on the basis of their excavation of oral and written sources. Even more materials exist dealing with the history of labor unions, an organizational phenomenon that at no period in American history has involved a majority of nonagricultural workers. Norman Best’s account of his life and work is therefore to be heartily welcomed in its detailed, and even TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 433 loving, recollections of work as a machinist, lumber mill worker, motorcycle messenger, and especially road and highway construction worker during the period from the late 1920s to the recent past. Best’s autobiography is unique among accounts of American lives in its emphasis on work planned and performed with a kind of bluecollar integrity and dignity once commonplace but rare today. The manner in which Best approached the daily tasks at hand, whether as a youngster in the sawmills and 1920s-vintage garages of his native Idaho, or later as a machinist in the Bethlehem Shipyards of World War II San Francisco, or as a member of a road construction crew, was that of respect for the nature of the undertaking coupled with a high degree of positive concept of self as a well-integrated member of the working fraternity. Best was, and is, a believer in the truth of the adage a “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay,” as well as a fervent adherent to the idea and reality of workplace democracy; a faith that led him for a time into the ranks of the Communist party of the Depression era. A Celebration of Work, edited by historian William G. Robbins, provides a gold mine of information on the specific nature and content of the variousjobs and work assignments the author held over the years. It spells out in graphic fashion just what was involved in such areas as road and highway construction over the years, including descriptions of various positions on the construction gangs, the use...