In a series of brief and incisive essays, Paul Josephson seeks to explain to a curious public or to high-school and college students the interconnected world of commonplace modern technological objects and the political, economic and cultural factors that underpin their market success. Gender, class and race play as crucial a part in this analysis as the logic of mass production and the intricate science of technological innovation. Thus, in a chapter on the development and refinement of the sports bra, a cogent essay on reconciling physical needs, social expectations, material and design, he reflects on the role played by women as makers, researchers and users of an item of apparel that many established sportswear manufacturers and male-oriented sports shops simply spurned and which in turn reflected the increased participation of women since the 1970s in athletics events and sports activity. Within the wider parameters of these individual ‘technostories’, however, the sports bra serves as a rare example of both consumer agency and female participation. Most of the other five case studies – ranging widely from fish sticks (or ‘fish fingers’ as they are known on this side of the Atlantic), through bananas and aluminium cans, potatoes and industrial sweeteners, to Hurricane Katrina, ‘natural’ disasters and their anthropogenic origins, and the Stalinesque symbolism of grandiose state-driven technologies in Vladimir Putin's Russia – take the contrary view that the consumer or the small farmer is seldom in charge of technological change and is more often, in terms of health, well-being or ability to hold on to land and enjoy a clean environment, its almost powerless victim. Soaring rates of obesity and diabetes thus owe more, in his view, to the pervasive use of artificial sweeteners by the food industry than to the conscious choice of children and other consumers. In this Josephson is drawn, not uncritically, to the theorizing of Jacques Ellul and the idea of an autonomous, self-augmenting ‘technological determinism’.

Tracing the rise of everyday consumer objects, like supermarket bananas, canned drinks or French fries, back to their origins and through their evolving trajectories of research, development and marketing unfolds overlapping narratives of imperial greed and racist contempt, of land-grabbing and unpaid compensation, profit maximization and environmental despoliation. Fish sticks, Josephson argues in his opening chapter, were not something consumers ever clamoured for. They were pioneered to suit the needs of the food industry, because of a glut of otherwise unsaleable white fish, bulk harvested from the oceans, frozen into amorphous blocks for ease of preservation and transport, sliced up by industrial bandsaws, and then foisted by intensive promotional techniques on hesitant storekeepers and a reticent public. In this, as in most of the author's other cases, this is primarily an American story, one in which named big-business corporations along with state initiatives and subsidies (some dating back to the idealism of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal) colluded, to the tax-paying cost and material detriment of the public, with cutting-edge scientific research and aggressive marketing. But the examples he selects also have international ramifications. Explaining the rise of banana consumption thus entails consideration of the history and politics of Jamaica, the development of banana production as an export staple in the island's post-sugar and -slavery era and the land seizures by transnational bauxite mining companies (forming a link to the production of aluminium for drink cans) that further marginalized already impoverished small farmers and wrecked the environment until (in a singular example of local resistance) the Michael Manley government sought to reclaim control over Jamaica's land, employment and welfare. The final chapter, on Putin's Russia, also travels well beyond the immediate sphere of American politics. It not only locates technology as a matter of state prestige and regime legitimacy; it also focuses on the environmental hazards to the Arctic associated with the projected exploitation of polar mineral resources and the opening of a strategic seaway across the north of the Russian landmass from Kamchatka to Murmansk. Global warming, the pillage of the earth, the overharvesting of the seas and the pollution of the atmosphere – these are never far from this story, and the book ends, aptly enough, with a personal plea for Dutch-style cycling as a means to overcome the pernicious and costly dominance of the American automobile.

For a book that addresses a wide spectrum of technological goods and practices and yet seeks to engage a wide readership, Josephson employs extensive research and mobilizes some telling examples to illustrate the complex interlinkages between the domestic and the transnational, between politics, economics, sociology and both local and international cultures of authority, addiction, persuasion and choice. Some of the examples are so disparate – from Putin to sports bras – that they can perhaps only be read as separate essays around a loosely articulated theme – the underlying imperative to readers to look beyond the familiar consumerism of everyday life and to ‘follow the money’, as he puts it (p. 166). To a degree not evident in the book's title or its introduction and opening chapters, this is an angry, polemical work, a plea for action, which at its best is original and instructive and compresses a great deal of technical material into a brief and readable form, and at its worst (as in the conclusion, with its overwrought paean for the printed book) something of a personal rant. Its greatest appeal must inevitably be to American readers and consumers, but it strives, not unsuccessfully, to deliver a message of universal importance.