Technics and Civilization

Great book to give to a friend

This book was assigned to my architectural class as summer reading in about 1963. I finally read it this year. Had I read it then I would have profited, though I wonder if I would have had the necessary patience to complete it. It is full of sentences 6 to 8 lines long. Reading it took a good night's sleep and a cup of coffee. It is NOT a scientific history of industrialization. Rather it is an extended opinion piece with grand, sweeping generalizations concerned with how civilization influenced the development of the machine and the machine influenced civilization. Mumford has less than positive o[inions of capitalism and religion. So why read it? I think because it is fascinating to understand that so many of the dilemmas we face today were in place 68 years ago. In Mumford's formulations I keep seeing today's headline and understand better how we got here. I bought a 1934 first edition, second printing that was unmarked as the dealer promised although a bit more foxed and brown then I would have liked. I paid about $60. The penciled price inside was $1. Some have criticized the current reprint because it doesn't include the original black and white photos. I think one could find could find sufficient examples on the web and save some money.

This empirical analysis of almost anything, is a raw true form. It's information is timeless and has no bounds even for its time period.

He saw a flow of material history in creative point of view using eotechnic era. Even if few decades passed, Lewis Mumford's book is worthy.

Even in 2015, Mumford's writing and insights are fresh and provocative. A fascinating read.