What Happened to the Mammoths And Other Explorations of Science in Action Book

This anthology of essays and book chapters from a wide variety of authors (many of whom will be familiar to most readers) provides an often interesting overview of how technology interacts with society. The variety of topics covered make it quite ambitious in its approach, though it's a bit of a mixed bag in its execution. As one might expect from a multi-author work, the quality of the chapters varies widely with some offering deep and carefully-balanced analyses of complicated issues and others amounting to little more than polemical rants by neo-Luddites.

The editor seems to have done a decent job of curating the articles for variety in their views (though the attentive reader will certainly notice a left-wing political bias running through many of the entries), and the reader interested in but not informed about issues related to technology will find the book beneficial on the whole. However, readers who are informed about issues related to technology will find themselves skimming large sections of the book, desperately looking for some information they haven't already read countless times in their morning newspapers. Therein lies the book's greatest problem: it simply doesn't get deep enough into any of the many issues it covers to offer anything new to anyone but the most entry-level of students of technology.

Read it if you're new to these issues or if you're required to read it for a course, but if you've already studied technology (and particularly social or legal issues related to technology) for a while, you probably won't learn much from it.