He offers a riveting account of humanity’s 400-year quest to bend the natural world to its own purposes, for good or ill ... an easy canter through industrial history, enlivened by anecdote and unexpected detail ... He finishes by making a powerful case for regenerating the nuclear power industry ... Mr. Rhodes has scored another masterpiece, so it’s not churlish to regret a couple of omissions. On the American side in the Age of Steam was Oliver Evans, who as much as Trevithick deserves mention for the high-pressure steam engine; and the steamboats based on Henry Shreve’s designs for shallow Western rivers were as important in America as Stephenson’s locomotives were in Britain. Finally, Mr. Rhodes makes little mention of the British machine-tool makers—above all, Henry Maudslay—who created indispensable precision tools. Still, there’s more than enough energetic exposition in Energy: A Human History for anyone who cares to learn how and why we are now so richly empowered.
It's...wide-ranging and compulsively readable ... clear and informative; he's able to explain difficult concepts without patronizing the reader ... And his decision to focus his book on the people behind energy is a good one. He doesn't limit himself to obvious names ... Refreshingly, Rhodes refuses to be cynical about the future of energy and its effects on climate change ... he urges action without succumbing to fatalism ... Energy is an excellent book that manages to be both entertaining and informative, and it's likely to appeal to both science fans and those of us who only passed physics by the skin of our teeth.
Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance. In a fast-paced narrative, he conducts readers on a journey from humanity’s dependence on wood as the primary fuel source to the use of coal and up to the development of nuclear energy and solar energy ... his exceptional book is required reading for anyone concerned about the human impact on the future of the world.
Motivated by the climate change crisis, Richard Rhodes’s Energy: A Human History sets out on a historical tour of how humans have manipulated nature to lift, transport, heat, and illuminate things over the past four centuries. Rhodes brings the same storytelling finesse to this work that he brought to his 1986 Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, as well as the conviction that nuclear power is the solution for moving humankind away from fossil fuels ... But his cavalier treatment of nuclear disasters and the radioactive waste problem fails to commend the atom as a green energy. Nevertheless, Rhodes’s hope that a critical look at past energy technologies will benefit those of the future is heartening. May this come to pass.
Throughout his survey, Rhodes is meticulous in paying tribute to many of the relatively obscure players in the slow advances in technology that led to more publicized breakthroughs. Rhodes doesn’t minimize the downsides of advances, both human and environmental, yet, on the whole, this is a beautifully written, often inspiring saga of ingenuity and progress, ideal for general readers.
Despite resistance from climate contrarians and the Trump administration, the world has begun a historic shift from fossil fuels to energy sources that produce far fewer greenhouse gases ... And yet, he devotes fewer pages to solar energy than to the use of horses in early 20th century urban American. (To be fair, the details of how all those New York horses were tended and fed are eye-opening, as is the financial blow hay farmers suffered when cars replaced the horses.) Wind power fares better, but not by much ... Regardless of your own personal opinions, however, it’s hard not to wish that Rhodes had lavished the same attention on this current energy transition as on the others explored in this intensely researched book. Who knows how many more interesting stories he would have found?
In this meticulously researched work, Rhodes brings his fascination with engineers, scientists and inventors along as he presents an often underappreciated history ... I wanted more when Rhodes turns to the modern day. The final chapter of Energy touches on wind and solar, but its real focus is Rhodes’s comfort zone of nuclear energy ... While such information would be considered current in the time span considered by the book, in today’s energy world, it is already quite dated ... This is a book as ambitious as its title suggests. Rhodes’s optimism is clearly strained by the enormity of the challenge posed by climate change.
Rhodes’s discussions about environmental damage are welcome, and his tour of bold innovators is well guided. But he fails to mention the women who helped to revolutionize the field — from discoverer of nuclear fission Lise Meitner to solar-power pioneer Mária Telkes. Nor does he devote much space to renewable energy. His history is uneven in other ways: the latter third of the book is a critique of the anti-nuclear lobby that, in my view, skews the overall message ... A scholar of Rhodes’s stature should have offered a deeper understanding of our struggle to improve our energy capacity —one of our most pressing global challenges.
Rhodes is keenly aware of the environmental damage that different forms of energy have caused ... Yet Rhodes writes with confidence ... To frame his argument, Rhodes turns energy development into a story. He weaves together short portraits of scientists and inventors alongside detailed descriptions of technical challenges to advancement ... It’s a big tableau with entertaining personal details ... The stories are engaging, though at times one feels that the profiles stack up one on top of another, with details that could have been pruned.
Author of two dozen books, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes is a writer of exceptional breadth and skill. His subtitle A Human Story highlights the role of individual invention, but also the broader humanity whose needs and demands those inventors served — often with unintended results ... Energy is a textbook model of factual reporting and the use of telling detail. For example in his description of the Cornish Giant, notice how Rhodes re-creates the scene not only in three physical dimensions, but in a fourth dimension of historical time, where men's height and strength are relative.
From the Pulitzer and National Book Award winner, a magisterial history of 'how human beings…[have] confronted the deeply human problem of how to draw life from the raw materials of the world' ... Calling this a classic like Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) may be slightly premature, but it’s definitely a tour de force of popular science, which is no surprise from this author.
Rhodes delivers brilliantly on the inner workings of steam engines and reactors, and his lively narrative takes readers on thrilling side trips ... His fascinating tale will delight technology wonks and particularly appeal to inventors and discoverers.
