194 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE America. Osborne notes that significant scientific activity took place in the colonies, but he limits his discussion to Auguste Hardy’s botanical researches in Algiers. In my view, Osborne has focused too narrowly on institutional and political issues at the expense of technical, social, and cultural matters. Local voices are completely absent from the narrative. Osborne’s assertion that “the French were not interested in learning about farming from the North Africans” (p. 163) may be generally true. There are counterexamples, however, such as Jean-Jacques ClémentMullet ’s and Auguste Cherbonneau’s translations of Islamic treatises on agriculture, which were not motivated by purely historical inter ests. Yet the book is valuable as a keen account of one 19th-century scientific institution, its relation to politics, and its affiliation with colo nialism. François Charette Mr. Charette is a graduate student in history at the University of Montreal, where he completed an M.A. thesis dealing with 19th-century European historiography of Islamic and Hindu science, technology, and medicine. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908—1918. By Robert Wohl. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. vii + 320; illustrations, notes, index. $35.00. Every so often, a book comes along that dramatically alters the way we understand aviation’s place in our culture. In 1946, William Fielding Ogburn’s sweeping sociological study, The Social Effects of Aviation, investigated the impact of the airplane on areas such as the family, cities, manufacturing, agriculture, government and public policy, and international politics. Thirty-seven years later, Joseph J. Corn’s The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation abandoned the standard approach to writing the history of aviation to focus on, in Corn’s words, “the emotional aspects of our historical response to machines like the airplane” (p. viii). In 1994, we have Robert Wohl’s skillful and articulate A Passionfor Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908—1918, the first of a projected three-part cultural history of aviation. In undertaking the project, Wohl observed that the history of aviation “lived in a wellfurnished but essentially walled-off compartment that most histori ans . . . had no need to visit” and was convinced that it had to be integrated into “the main narrative of the twentieth-century West” (pp. 1—2). More important, he was intrigued with “the compulsion that people felt to transform, through the play of their imagina tion, the most mechanical of events—the invention and development of the Hying machine—into a form of spiritual creation” (p. 2). The book’s analysis of the airplane’s encounter with the imagination in the formative period of its development is extensive. Among other TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 195 things, it deals with the literary precursors of military action in the skies; the reaction of poets and painters to the airplane; the fascina tion with aviation, death, and immortality; and aviation and the trans formation of modern culture. The decade covered was perhaps the most fertile in the history of aviation for artists, intellectuals, and the public. It was a time, as Wohl says, “long dreamt about, enshrined in fable and myth” that “excited people’s imagination and appeared to be the coming of a New Age” (p. 1). It was also a time, before the beginning of the Great War, when “attitudes toward aviation were almost always filtered through the lens of patriotic feelings. To see an aviator in the sky was to receive a powerful political message” (p. 259). To be superior in aero nautics “was to put to rest nagging doubts about those national virtues needed to survive in a Darwinian world where the weak were doomed to fall prey to the strong” (p. 259). It is the tension and affinity between wonderment and nationalistic fervor that Wohl balances so superbly and that make this book such a valuable contribution to the history of aviation. Attending an air meet in Brescia, Italy, in 1909, the young Franz Kafka describes the apparently miraculous ascent of aviator Henry Rougier. Rougier, Kafka wrote, “appeared so high in the air that one thought that soon his course would have to be...