800 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tory, and skyscraper, urging “modern” people to leave behind the soft, the natural, the communal, and the romantic? Or does he probe the terrible cost of the machine age by setting his portrayals slightly askew with understated, almost violent, interventions? “In his beautifully crafted and masterfully composed images of a machine-dominated world ... he seems to mourn the death of the creative self’s autonomy in a mood of anxious melancholy” (p. 139). For all its fine qualities—including the seventy marvelous reproduc tions that permit the reader to pause and contemplate—the book is flawed by an exceedingly narrow research base. When Lucic moves beyond her intimacy with Sheeler’s work and the artistic traditions he frequented, she betrays a skimpy reading of important related scholarship. To cite one example from too many, Lucic finds Russia’s invitation that Sheeler photograph Soviet industry surprising “despite the subject’s association with Ford’s intensively competitive, capitalistic enterprise” (p. 98). I got the impression that Lucic is unaware of Ford’s, and other American capitalists’, many Russian connections. Ford and his namesake corporation are well known for their symbolic, economic, and technological relationships with Lenin, Stalin, and Soviet public rhetoric, all of which render an invitation to Sheeler anything but unusual. From another perspective, I found myself wanting more about Sheeler himself. Lucic succeeds so well in questioning how Sheeler’s works could contain the elegant, ethereal beauty of the industrial landscape in the same frame with turbulent and fragmenting interjections. She whets the appetite for more about the artist himself to help understand how Sheeler managed these modernist tensions on a personal level. In short, my reading of this lovely, slender volume provoked me, nourished me, and left me wanting more. Left me thoughtful. John M. Staudenmaier, S.J. Dr. Staudenmaier is professor of the history of technology at the University of Detroit Mercy. He recently published several studies of “Henry Ford,” “Fordism,” and “The Rouge” as polyvalent symbolic constructions. All form part of his work on a booklength study in progress of “Henry Ford as Symbol and Symbol Maker.” The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life. By David F. Channell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xi+ 192; illustrations, notes, index. $22.95. The Vital Machine is an essay that employs historical materials to promote a new point of view from which to consider our present and future. It does so quite successfully because of the knowledgeable and methodical manner in which the argument is advanced and because the argument is not quite as novel after all: most readers will approach the book—at least to some extent—already previously converted. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 801 The Vital Machine tells the story of the historical rivalry between a mechanical and an organic worldview and its eventual conciliation. Both originated in antiquity: a survey of their concurrent but com peting and interacting developments makes up the bulk of the book. David Channell takes care to distinguish between practical technolo gies and the associated scientific theories on one level and the world views derived thereofon another, and he stresses the point that it was only on this second level that rivalries existed. In recent decades, the developments in both realms—mechanical and organic—have con verged, both on the level of technology and science. Here, the two traditional worldviews can no longer offer interpretation or guidance. What is needed—and this is Channell’s central thrust—is a new “bionic” worldview based on the model, or metaphor, of the “vital machine.” The concept of the vital machine, ofa machine that can incorporate mechanical and organic aspects, recognizes a process of integration in practical technology that has been gaining momentum in recent years. The bionic worldview has at its center not man but all of life, and thus it must be sensitive to the problems of defining life. A practical consequence of it must be a new “bionic ethics,” an ethics that measures the good or evil of actions not by their effects on humans alone but on the solidarity of all life on the globe, an ethics of obvious relevance...