Quentin R. Skrabec

I've read several historical perspectives on technology and technological achievements, so I can say that this book falls short of my expectations and experience. I'm not the "editor police," but the narrative is dry and plagued by inattention to grammar and spelling, and there are redundancies galore. Illustrations of machinery and products, photos of named individuals, and maps of regions mentioned are in short supply; inclusion would have helped show what the text clearly did not. In short, with such an interesting topic, this was a disheveled and disappointing read.… (más)

I requested this ER book because I enjoy history from a technological perspective; I was actively interested, not haphazardly clicking whatever. Alas, it demonstrates by negative example the skills involved in narrative non-fiction. I could never relax out of editor mode; I kept wanting to slash this or expand that or rearrange shifting themes and jiggly dates into coherent storylines. The style is business report, which doesn’t scale well to book length and complexity. It reads as though notes from various sources were collected without discrimination and strung together: a set of factoids in one paragraph, an overlapping set of factoids in the next paragraph, related paragraphs sequenced into chapters. So much potential here: the harvesting of rubber from its native jungle habitat in South America, the shift to plantations in Asia and experimental corporate colonies, the chemistry of making natural and synthetic rubber viable for mass manufacture, the transition from carriages to bicycles and automobiles and airplanes, the structure of tires (yes, really, illustrations would’ve been helpful), the intense personalities of prominent industrialists, the development of labor unions and application of management principles, the rise and fall of Akron OH. All there, sometimes mentioned in passing, sometimes occupying central place but obscured by clutter of extraneous and frequently duplicate details. Frustrating.… (más)