Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1687815 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Booklist
The word civilization brings images of the pyramids of Egypt, Greek temples, or great libraries and museums to mind, monumental structures that not only reflect idealized social order but offer evidence to support Sass' claim that "materials guided the course of history." None of these awe-inspiring constructions or their contents would have been possible without the ingenious manipulation of raw materials. The symbiotic relationship between the shape of culture and the evolution of technology is acknowledged in terms such as the Bronze Age, and Sass, a professor at Cornell University and a writer of both affability and precision, bridges the divide between history and science as he explains the unique properties of such key substances as clay, iron, glass, polymers, and silicon, and how they have affected every aspect of civilization from warfare to religion, politics, education, art, and economics. Noting the direct correlation between the complexity of any given society and the sophistication of the materials it uses, Sass provides diverse and illuminating examples with unflagging and infectious enthusiasm. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
Remember when you learned about the Stone Age, followed by Bronze and Iron? Well, it didn't exactly stop there, and Sass, a Cornell materials-science professor, is our guide to all the successive wonders of luck, pluck, and technology that have enabled us to move from cave days to today's steel-polyethylene-and-silicon world. Moving chronologically, with some time out to explain what makes metal metal or introduce notions like yield strength, plastic deformation, and dislocations, Sass treats the reader to a materials-science course for the layperson, laced with lots of didja-knows: Did you know that smelting copper often meant releasing toxic arsenic gas, which is probably why Hephaestus in the Iliad is described as lame? That ``carat'' comes from the Greek keration, for locust-pod tree, because the dried pod nearly always weighed 200 milligrams (now the standard)? In short, there are gobs of wonderful trivia as well as accounts of the technological innovations that led to ever hotter furnaces, blown glass, steel from iron, and all the latter-day wonders, from synthetic rubber, celluloid, and rayon to aluminum alloys, Kevlar, plastics, silicon chips, and composites. How each of these material discoveries and inventions affected society is an important subtextbut the point of view is largely apolitical. (The reader will infer that building bigger and better arms, however, has clearly been a strong motivating force for material invention.) Sass is not always successful in getting the reader over technological hurdles; there are pages of photos (unseen), but the text could surely use diagrams as well. What he doesand does wellis convey the richness of the material world and the ingenuity of humankind in making use of it. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

What a terrific book!
Wow. I found this book more interesting than any other I've read in the last couple of years. It's a great introduction to an interesting field on which few people ever focus.

I'm a recovering English major who studied very little science in school but have been reading more science as an adult. But, of course, I've been limited by my lack of the technical background most science writing demands. This book (while it certainly doesn't ignore the science) does a reasonably good job of conveying the substance of the scientific principles involved in the field in a non-technical way (though I'll admit to some moments of saying "well, I THINK I understand what that meant.")

But what I really enjoyed is the way in which the author conveyed some of the historical and economic importance of materials science -- raising issues such as why the Romans didn't have steel or how a misunderstanding of the structure of aluminum had a direct impact upon the economy of post-WWII England. After finishing the book, I feel I have a new way of looking at the man-made world and an appreciation of its complexity that I'd missed before.

Too literary for a textbook, not clever enough for else
The thesis of "The Substance of Civilization," by Stephen L. Sass, is that history is "an alloy of all the materials that we have invented or discovered, manipulated, used, and abused, and each has its tale to tell." Sass, a professor of materials science at Cornell, describes the principal difficulties, and how they were overcome, in the acquisition and manipulation of clay, copper, bronze, gold, silver, iron, glass, alloys, polymers, diamonds, composites, and silicon (coming in a sense full circle). In the chapter on glass, for example, we learn the difference in properties between thin and thick glass, and how the molecular structure of glass creates those properties. Then we see the history of glass, from speculation about the first glass glazes on 4000 B.C. clay pots to a brief discussion of optical fibers.
Sass is about as good at making his subject seem engaging as is the average high school professor. While his few amusing anecdotes are well chosen, they don't mesh well with the actual information, which is delivered like a series of slides. In his historical stories, he affects a clever, cynical style but often can't quite pull it off. Switching between materials science, macroengineering, and politics within a page is often a schizophrenic experience. "Substance" would have been better written as a textbook, and Sass is well equipped to write both the body and the sidebars. But this indexless, freeform structure serves more to conceal the usefulness of the book than to package it. With his intelligence and expertise, Sass was a few good decisions away from a readable book. He made very few of them.

Fascinating reading for anyone
Good historical overview of materials,interspersed with just enough scientific writing to keep the scientifically inclined layman interested. This book is a fascinating account of how civilization discovered and in turn was shaped by the most prosaic of things: The underlying, physical building blocks (I especially loved the discussion of the genesis of steel and its effects). I read it three times and bought two copies to give away as presents