Review by Choice Review
Coming at a time when industries throughout the US are rusting away and moving overseas, when plants everywhere seem to be duplicating the loss of industry experienced by New England in the early 20th century, the Most Wonderful Machine fills an important need. Fortunately, social history now more fully synthesizes social, along with labor and management and women's issues, to give readers an intelligent understanding of socioeconomic dynamics. In this case, the focus is on the paper mills of Berkshire County, Massachusetts. The ``most wonderful machine'' (adapted from a Melville line) may abstractly refer to the human adaptiveness that made mechanization work successfully, and to the impact mechanization had on the social and cultural transformation of 19th-century America. Berkshire County was an area high in skills and capital, forever changed by the introduction of the Fourdrinier (the ``most marvelous machine'' specifically involved in this study), a complicated machine that manufactured paper, thus ending artisanship. Understanding how we became a successful industrial nation provides a starting point for more contemporary analysis of why we are now deindustrializing. McGaw looks clearly (if at times a bit drily) at the first part of the equation, somewhat like Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1964). This work is a creditable effort that goes beyond local limits. Upper-division and graduate collections.-R.W. Kern, University of New Mexico
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
