Customer Reviews

The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (American History and Culture)

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A delightful history of our American obsession with self-improvement and reinvention, our love affair with gimmicks and gadgetry, and our unshakable devotion to the promise of the quick fix. A font of well-researched information treated with humor and insight, this book provides a rich context for the ongoing body-image debate in present day American culture. Highly recommended!

This book shows that our current obsessions with our bodies and machines have roots as old as the rise of consumer electricity. Technology in America takes on religious forms. And Professor de la Pena shows the extent of influence of such ideas as "electricity as therapy." This is so well written you won't be able to put it down. It explains complex technological details in clear and precise terms. Its influence should last a long time.

Carolyn Thomas de la Pena has written a masterful book. In exploring the ways Americans have used their bodies to understand new technologies, she sheds light on the origins of our own interactions with modern machines. The author supports her findings with meticulously researched facts, and it is clear she spent exhausting hours in the archives, combing through newspaper articles, advertisements, and product materials. She does an equally thorough job of contextualizing her conclusions. By linking her findings to social and cultural shifts taking place at the same time people were drinking radium water or experimenting with electric belts, she strengthens her argument and is able to draw new and important conclusions about the ways Americans were using technology around the turn of the twentieth century. Her clear and concise writing style make the book a smooth and enjoyable read, besides being one that is extremely relevant to our modern lives.

As I read this book, I marveled at the way in which Ms. Thomas de la Pena explained in detail the obsession Americans have had for so long with physical fitness and weight loss techniques; the belief by many Americans that their bodies, after use of some of these documented, extreme -- to us -- measures, would emerge greatly improved. This book helps us energy-bar-eating, aerobically-charged, iron-pumping 21st-Century individuals understand how it is that we got this way!