IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. 42, NO. 2, JUNE 1999 137 David E. Nye Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies Book Review —Reviewed by MARK ZACHRY Manuscript received February 16, 1999; revised February 19, 1999. The reviewer is with the Department of English, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322 USA (email: mzachry@english.usu.edu). IEEE PII S 0361-1434(99)04924-3. Book Publisher: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, 331 pp., including index. Index Terms—Energy, history of technology, social change. Rapid technological change is so much a part of contemporary life that few of us have time to understand the new technolo- gies we employ, much less to think about the implications of our choices to accept or reject them, before we are presented with the opportunity to use still newer technologies. Professional commu- nicators, for example, had only just begun to appreciate the promise and peril of desktop publishing when online publishing became an option, further complicating the ways in which we could potentially communicate with one another. In Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, David E. Nye invites his readers to think about technological choices and their consequences for society. He does so with an engaging study of how the United States, from the pre-Colonial era until the 1990s, developed into “the world’s largest consumer of energy” (p. 1). At first glance, a history of en- ergy technologies may seem far removed from the concerns of most readers of this journal. Such an assumption, however, would be misguided. While some readers will certainly turn to this book for information about how energy has been extracted from horses, steam, coal, nuclear reactors, and other sources, the real value of Nye’s study is that he accounts for the social arrangements that emerged around and supported these en- ergy technologies. Communica- tive practices, Nye demonstrates, have been no less affected by energy technologies than have our leisure, marketing, transportation, and political activities. Balancing engaging narratives with well- documented social trends, Nye demonstrates that the junctures between cultural practices and energy technologies in the United States are meaningful points worth the attention of anyone concerned with technological change. Those of us who make a profession of un- derstanding and explaining tech- nologies to others will particularly benefit from reading this study. The book examines the develop- ment of energy technologies in a roughly chronological order, allow- ing for the overlaps in these tech- nologies, many of which remain with us today. In nine chapters, Nye takes the reader from the early history of North America, when the energy harnessed by sail-powered sea vessels made the meeting of European and indigenous cultures possible, to the ecological disasters that have attended our energy production and transportation activities in recent years. Along the way, he explores such varied topics as the economic advantages the Northern states enjoyed before the Civil War because they opted to develop water power rather than slavery; the importance of steam power in the rise of Chicago as a major metropolis; the significance of corporations in the development of modern, networked cities; how electricity made factory production more efficient; the development of a consumer culture after the advent of domestic electricity; the role energy played in race rela- tions; the recent emergence of an electronic culture; and the growth of the suburban lifestyle. Nye’s book, however, offers more than just an interesting chronol- 0361–1434/99$10.00  1999 IEEE