REVIEWS Master Mechanics & Wicked Wizards: Images of the American Scientist as Hero and Villain from Colonial Times to the Present, by Glen

This book has a catchy title and nice cover art, adding to the reader’s anticipation that it will be an absorbing—and entertaining— read. The price is reasonable, making it potentially attractive as a text. And the book is, in fact, generally quite well written. America’s romance with technology is com-plicated, contradictory, and confusing, and it certainly deserves more scholarly attention. However, much has already been written on this subject, not enough of which finds its way into the pages of this book. The intro-duction suggests that its author, fiction writ-er and English professor Glen Scott Allen, imagines an audience largely unfamiliar with social and cultural studies of science and technology, and tends to leave the impression that he is unfamiliar with much of this work himself. Allen concentrates on what he sees as Americans ’ suspicion of the purely scientif-ic, as opposed to the technological, a suspi-cion that he correctly surmises may have roots in social class distinctions. He reports that in researching this book, he ‘‘began to wonder to what extent... American culture [has] shaped American scientific practice’’ (p. 5), as though this were an entirely origi-nal question. In Chapter One, he marvels that in 1848 the American Association for the Advancement of Science adopted pro-motion of the ‘‘purer’ ’ sciences as its goal (p. 17), and in general implies surprise at his discovery of the social, political, and class-based character of science (although it is not exactly clear how the AAAS vision is an argument that Americans distrust sci-ence, instead of an argument that at least some of us approve of it). He discusses the ‘‘selling’ ’ of American science in Chapter Three without any apparent reference either to the work of sociologist Dorothy Nelkin or to that of media historian Marcel Lafollette, two scholars especially well-known for their careful documentation of how media repre