Energy: A Human History
Richard Rhodes
Science, engineering, history
Maybe I'm just the wrong reader; I know a lot of this story already. Or maybe my expectations were too high, based on Rhodes's prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. For whatever reason, Energy was a bit of a let-down.
I can't really point to anything wrong with it. It's more that, for most of its length, it doesn't do anything unusually right. Rhodes treats a series of energy sources (steam, petrochemicals, nuclear, etc.) in a lucid pop-sci fashion, giving a capsule history of the development of each. It's fine. It's just not very innovative.
The book only really gets interesting, in fact, when Rhodes gets around to nuclear power. This is where he stops reporting and starts analyzing. He's decidedly a Wizard, not a Prophet. He pays little or no attention to arguments that humanity needs to reduce its energy footprint--indeed, he takes it for granted that no such thing will occur. (I think he's probably right.) Without being polemical or myopic about it, Rhodes is pretty clearly on the side of more nuclear power. He makes a strong case, too. Coal kills a lot of people.
If you're looking for a good topic overview with no need for a technical background, Energy is for you. If you're looking for thoughtful argument, the last third of Energy is arguably for you. If you're looking for something groundbreaking, you might have to look elsewhere.
The Grid only partially overlaps Energy, but it's a very intriguing book. Coal, by Barbara Freese (and also subtitled "A Human History"), is a decent biography-of-a-substance book that covers related territory. For the emergence of steam as the first non-muscle-based power source, I liked Christopher McGowan's The Rainhill Trials (among others).
That's the problem with fly-on-the-wall books. I read a reasonably good book a few years ago called The Battery, which was all about the drive to design an anode that can withstand the thousands of charge-ups and charge-downs necessary to run an electric car without degrading; the hook was the story of a daring start-up staffed by ingenious materials-science engineers. But -- after the author had invested three years in their story -- the engineers turned out to be less "ingenious" than "overconfident", and the results they were relying on from a Korean research lab turned out to be faked, and the lead engineer's proud I-don't-suffer-fools attitude was revealed as mere unfounded arrogance. But the author was on deadline. So instead of going back and re-writing the book to make it a story of human overreach (that would still explain a lot about battery design and why it's important), the author just left the first nine-tenths of the book as a build-up to a heroic denouement that never comes, and tacked on a last chapter that basically said "Anyway none of it worked, so, yeah, that's a thing that happened. Bye!"
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