Technology and Culture

422 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE unavoidable. The narrative takes, and requires the reader to take, at once the long and short view and to move from a process narrative of natural history to individual actions and ideas. Pyne creates some of the problem. He is interested in every detail and every source, speculates on every interesting idea, and ruminates on every insight. The accumulation of (however excellent) mini-essays and diversions will cause some to apply the comment an exasperated reader made about Pyne’s Fire in America: “What this book needs is a good controlled burn.” Short of that the reader may wish to try judicious skimming. What should be avoided is outright skipping. The book’s prime value is its comprehensive view, its attempt to deal with fire on every level from symbol to tool and to show how several societies have not only seen but used fire in vastly different ways—and how it has changed them. This is a complex narrative, involving in unusual ways topics and evidence not usually thought historical. Its successes and even its failures can teach historians lessons about the analysis of technologies in societies. Thomas R. Dunlap Dr. Dunlap, professor of history at Texas A&M University, has written two books on nature and wildlife policy, DDT and Saving America’s Wildlife, and a dozen articles. He is currently working on a comparative study of nature and wildlife policies and ideas in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Hard Places: Reading the Landscape ofAmerica’s Historic Mining Districts. By Richard V. Francaviglia. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Pp. xx+ 237; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. The social critic Raymond Williams once suggested that modern people need to recognize all the results of their activities, both good and bad, if they wish to better understand their relationships with each other and the natural environment. According to Williams, the world transformed by human activity contains no by-products; rather, “the slag heap is as real a product as the coal.” Richard Francaviglia also recognizes this truth about the slag heap when he declares that “Hard Places is based on the premise that there is as much meaning and value in places that we are not supposed to revere as there is in those that are venerated” (p. xvii). What follows this opening statement is an enthusiastic and occa­ sionally personal celebration of the landscapes left by those in search of subterranean resources. With an emphasis on buildings and artificial landforms, the book should be of interest to architectural historians, historical archaeologists, and historic preservationists. Francaviglia provides for the uninitiated and the serious enthusiast a means for recognizing a portion of the visual order that remains in a TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 423 historic mining district. I suspect, however, that the readers of Technology and Culture will find it of less interest for several reasons. For one, the author’s use of evidence seems insufficient for his assertions. The book is peppered with statements like “size for size, mining districts are probably the most ethnically diverse of all communities in America” (p. 103). An intriguing proposition, it is, unfortunately, unsupported by any data or references. This paucity of evidence can perhaps be explained by the book’s purpose: to be “an introduction to the . . . subject of mining landscapes” (p. xix). Nev­ ertheless, such assertions will frustrate a sophisticated reader. Another shortcoming is the limited discussion of the technologies involved in mining. Although industrial structures such as headframes or breakers are considered, little is said about what is housed in these structures or why they appear when they do and in the forms that they do. This limited discussion is a consequence of the fact that the book’s primary object of study is a landscape. Landscape is a visually examined artifact that results from the intersection of time, location, and culture. A study at this scale directs the analysis toward the perceptible and relegates the hidden, the visually uncommanding, and the nonvisual to a secondary position. Thus, in a book like Hard Places, what is inside the buildings (and underground!) is less important than those features that can...