Salvatore Basile’s Cool is a sprawling account of the history of air conditioning. Mostly it is about the United States and modern mechanical cooling, and generally it is organized chronologically—except for a discouraging moment when the narrative reaches the Depression era and then begins all over again with trains in the 1830s. A strength of the book is that it covers recent controversies, such as air conditioning’s part in the energy crisis and ozone depletion, and the inventive ways in which architects and engineers are experimenting with technical solutions to the technology’s seemingly devastating environmental impacts. However, from the start, Basile makes clear that he does not want to recapitulate the technical history of air conditioning. Instead, he claims that “equally important and often overlooked is the story of how people reacted to it in those far-off days: sometimes with enthusiasm, but other times with ignorance, or disapproval, or even pious condemnation. Reactions like these are not only entertaining; they’re significant” (p. 4). Indeed, he includes heaps of historical detail that serve to make the people and the machines of the past appear silly, awkward, ignorant, recklessly ambitious, and perhaps amusing.

However, Basile does not escape a technical framework for his study entirely. Without making it an explicit declaration, he assumes that atmospheric cooling is the only modern approach to comfort and mechanical refrigeration is the only effective approach to atmospheric cooling, so there are literally hundreds of descriptions of failed air conditioning installations that never rose to that level of sophistication. Had he thought of comfort in human terms rather than mechanical ones, he would have been able to recognize that less powerful systems are able to cool the body even if they cannot cool the room. In that context, many of the failed installations are not as irrational as he makes them seem. There are missed opportunities in this approach as well. For example, he cites with dismay the nineteenth-century prescriptions for formal public dress (p. 15), but he also could have explored how real people circumvented those rules in hot weather—that is, under what circumstances women left off their corsets and men took off their frock coats. That would indeed have put people at the center of the analysis. Such historical insight does not come easily, however, especially not from a keyword search of the primary literature.

Perhaps a more fundamental weakness of the book for the readers of this publication is the author’s willingness to let what is technically possible, rather than what was economically likely, shape his narrative. Many of the systems he describes were not technical failures as much as economic disasters. Basile is not silent on the issues of initial and operating costs, but is inconsistent in his attention to the economic fundamentals that shaped the consumer acceptance of air conditioning. He claims that it took decades “for the public to trust that machine” (p. 4), although it may be more accurate to say that it took that long for the ordinary consumer to afford it. If you want to put people at the heart of the air conditioning story, what better way to calibrate consumer interest than what they are willing to pay for atmospheric comfort? Instead, one of the ways that Basile gauges the public’s acceptance of air-conditioned comfort is to chart the installation of comfort systems in the Capitol and the White House. These systems have symbolic meanings for the voting public about work, leisure, energy efficiency, and ecologically smart design, he claims, and he returns to the Washington experience nine times from beginning to end. It is an argument that he makes repeatedly, but it does not build to any decisive conclusion.

This is the most encyclopedic history of air conditioning that I have ever read, and the reader will be amused before becoming exhausted. It is rich in research, with one or two quotations from primary documents for each page, but because only the lengthy passages are accorded citations, it will be hard to use it for further study. This body of detail would be even more engaging if Basile had used it to make a potent argument, but he seems content to conclude that “love it or despise it, air conditioning has insinuated itself into the world’s day-today existence” and “it’s not going away” (p. 254). Considering that most readers know that before they begin the book, the point here is to be amused by the journey.