Few scholars are better qualified to author a book on the broad topic of technology in post-World War II America than Carroll Pursell. American studies scholars will find in these pages the influences of many familiar and recent studies of American postwar culture blended with perhaps less familiar work from historians of technology. It is a welcome and growing trend, which Pursell has been practicing for many years.

Unlike Thomas Hughes's 1998 Rescuing Prometheus, which studied four large postwar projects as exemplary of trends in technology and culture, Pursell's book, by his own admission, is “ambitious in its coverage” (xvi) and touches on so many different developments that at times the abridged summaries of secondary readings swamp the thread of analysis. The worst of this compulsion to coverage is limited to just a few of his twelve chapters and might actually be useful in the classroom, where Pursell imagines most of his audience. The briefly covered topics leave room for students to ask their own questions – especially as his footnotes and bibliography provide avenues into the literature.

The bulk of Pursell's chapters provide a cogent, overarching analysis that draws on his own primary research interests to show how virtually every facet of postwar American culture manifested and extended a techno-hubris (my clumsy term, not his). He begins by looking at how choices made during World War II fused nascent government–industry cooperation into new research regimes that shaped technological development well into the postwar decades. He follows these new research regimes into areas such as the development of nuclear power, the morbid project of civil defense necessitated by atomic weapons, and the “technological dead end” (72) of the Apollo project and the Freedom space station. “State command and control of continuous technological change,” writes Pursell, “became the norm in the U.S. as it had been in the Soviet Union” (76). Furthermore, as American consumers rushed to buy houses, cars, and appliances, their leaders' embrace of technology and engineering influenced US foreign policy toward “developing” nations as they tried to export democracy and “progress” while seeking markets, resources, and opportunities for American capital. At the same time, the best and the brightest from other nations flocked to the American schools and industries comprising the postwar research regime, thereby increasing the United States' already substantial economic advantages while exacerbating their home countries' brain drain and development problems.

Pursell provides an especially strong exploration of the growing resistance in the 1960s and 1970s to the dominance of the more-technology-equals-progress ideology. This portion of the book highlights Pursell's own prior study of the appropriate technology movement and the US Office of Technology Assessment and sets up his sharp criticism of Americans' rejection of the “soft path” in the 1980s and 1990s – epitomized by President Ronald Reagan's removal of the solar panels from the White House and Detroit's embrace of short-term profits in the form of gas-guzzling SUV sales. This is a book that will be useful in any course on modern American culture and will be of interest to serious general readers interested in the United States' recent past.