Customer Reviews

Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One would expect a history of plastic to be full of dreary minutia, of interest only to professional chemists. You couldn't be more wrong. The author is to be congratulated for taking a topic that could be dull and turning it into a historical account of how these substances have impacted our lives. Don't get me wrong, I am no lover of plastic but there are applications that require materials with the properties found in modern plastics. You just don't realize how crucial these substances are until you read this book.

Ever wonder about where things come from, how did they discover nylon, rayon, bakelite, tupperware, saran wrap? This book has the answers. Very readable.

This is a scholarly, tongue in cheek, thoroughly enjoyable peon to the most despicable of substances. Histories of science and industry could learn much from Mr. Fenichill's pleasing blend of knowledge and humor. This is one of my favorite books.

Fenichell is highly readable. He has appreciation for inventors who have developed new materials for the service of society. His book offers a balanced perspective, with engaging anecdotes.

A mild criticism concerns organization. The book is a sequence of anecdotes about different plastics. Why one is mentioned before another is not clearly explained. As a result, the book feels like journalistic stream of conscious in appreciating materials, their purposes and inventors. This is respectful of the subject, but it is a bit hard to put into overall context and see a big picture.

I came across this book by accident,while travelling. The colorful cover caught my eye, but soon after reading a few chapters I was hooked. It's the perfect beach book. Plastic is now a word that can conjure the idea of "cheap" or "fake" but it was not always so. Fenichell starts us at the beginning of the discovery of the various materials like man-made rubber and other things we now take for granted, and tells the story of each innovation as though we are standing there in the lab and the inventor yells "Eureka!" Stories about the inventors range from funny (you know Goodyear is going to eventually succeed because of his famous name, but he has many misadventures before success arrives) to poignant, in the stories where someone desperately wants to achieve fame and fortune but their "plastic" product fails to catch on and their name disappears into oblivion.
My only criticism is the chapter on my grandfather, who plays a prominent role in the history of plastic. Fenichell simplifies and distorts some of the facts about my grandfather's company, but I forgive him in that it makes the reading light and entertaining in the end (well, a couple of chapters get bogged down by technical explanations of certain chemical processes). This is a book for anyone interested in American history, sociology,and pop psychology: plastics of all kinds make up an inextricable part of every aspect of our daily lives.

This book is an engaging, easy to read modern history of plastic, roughly following the materials and their associated inventors, promoters, uses and abuses and aesthetics from the 1800s to the 1990s. There is a lot of philosophizing on the part of the narrator, but more than enough actual scientific and cultural history to make up for it. There are some black and white photos scattered throughout, and a complete index, but no bibliography, no notes or appendices or timeline of any kind. The book is laid out in chronological order, but dates and places are often only loosely given and skipped around, and no attempt is made to systematically explain the relations between the different kinds of plastic, let alone give chemical formulas or accurate production and manufacturing information. Contrast this with another more concretely informative work in a similar vein... say, "Twinkie, Deconstructed".

Plastic. The making of a synthetic century.

Stephen Fenichell. 1996 HarperBusiness

This book is shows good examples of many of the strengths and weaknesses of pop journalistic authorship of technical material. I don't want to slate it out of hand because it covers a great deal of valuable material that must have taken a good deal of hard work to collect. Unfortunately the author then understandably found the task of collation challenging, and the technical aspects beyond him. The infuriating thing to me is that journalistic writers do not let that bother them; they cheerfully grind on to the deadline, scattering the fragments of sense and sensibility wherever they get in the way. After all, the reader cannot be expected to understand such stuff, let alone care about it, so why worry about it?

Well maybe. . . But then why bother with the book anyway? Why stuff a book with nonsense to fill out the bits that the writer does not understand and is not equipped to explain? I surely cannot be the only reader who would rather do without an explanation than wade pointlessly through an incompetent non-explanation? Did Fenichell hope that readers who had skimmed over meaningless explanations would get a comfortable sense of having absorbed the gist? Good luck to such.

It is not just isolated errors that I am complaining about. Consider an example of my forbearance. Fenichell thinks that the lac insect is a beetle. Now, where he got that from, I cannot imagine, and it should have been no challenge to get the facts without consulting an entomological textbook (for the record, lac insects are members of a family of scale insects related to aphids and plant bugs. They are nearly as different as they can get from beetles and still be insects). But an isolated slip in a tangential point like that is forgivable and would hardly inconvenience most of his readers, who probably would hardly know the difference between a beetle and a scale insect anyway, so I gritted my teeth and looked the other way. My complaint is that the slip is not isolated and that he shows equal contempt for more relevant material where he is too ignorant to recognise that he is talking nonsense. Mentioning and glossing over things one does not understand in the appropriate context is forgivable, even helpful, but explaining them is an excellent example of where it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to say enough to remove all doubt.

Fenichell seems to know neither enough chemistry nor enough science of materials to speak sense about tham. He shows no comprehension of the difference between hardness and other concepts related to strength, and makes meaningless comparisons between say, abalone shell and steel. Either he never consulted chemists and engineers, or never asked them to vet his interpretations of their advice, or if he did, they were either too illiterate or too embarrassed to help him much. The first few times I found a description of a process or reaction that I could not follow, I put it down to careless skimming and pressed on, but soon I found that they were par for the course. In fact they generally got worse towards the end of the book. I am not sure whether this was because the subject matter was becoming too drastically technical for Fenichell to kid himself about, or whether it was just the problem that dilettantes perennially encounter when they wrote technical books. Commonly they find themselves out of their depth, ignominiously reduced to cramming what should have been the last three quarters of the book into what amounts to an appendix to the introductory chapters.

The closing chapters were the most tedious from my point of view, because that was where Fenichell concentrated on philosophy and quoted the views of various big names who seemed to know hardly anything about chemistry, engineering, economy, or materials science, but were quite willing to sound off in largely meaningless terms about plastics, nature, interfaces and the like. Oh welllll. . . Who am I to sneer? At least they made money and reputations that way.

Now, all Fenichell's glossings and handwavings leave me with a serious problem. If I cannot trust the items I do understand, then how am I to trust the book where it deals with material I know nothing about?

Fenichell starts with the history of plastics derived directly from natural products, such as rubber and cellulose. Allowing for my increasing distrust of anything he says, he presents a reasonable encapsulation of the subject matter. Unfortunately he has a his share of journalistic pose and writes as though his deadline and his professional mannerisms were more important than unaffectedly addressing and informing his readership. The book reads as though neither he nor an editor was interested in checking his prose for readability and comprehensibility. There are repeated passages where one has to reread a sentence to make sense of the concord. Yes, we all make such slips occasionally, but when it happens time and again, someone has been neglecting his workmanship to the extent that it amounts to contempt for the reader. Fenichell's journalese tempts him into weary wordplays and hackneyed opening references to what his subjects were doing at such and such a place on such and such a time, with no sense of when or whether such atmospheric artifices help the story. It leaves the reader (this one anyway) with a sense similar to watching those dreadful TV reporters who have been told to use their hands rather than stand like talking tailors' dummies. They proceed to gesture mechanically, stiltedly, and without any connection to what they are saying.

That is much like the effect that reflexive journalese narrative style has on sound and sense.

Make no mistake, I have read worse by far, but Fenichell's prose could do with some serious delousing. The pity is that when he actually writes unaffectedly and does not get entangled in his sentence construction, he does so quite pleasantly. The book gives me a frustrating sense of a valuable work spoilt for a haporth of homework and care.

Fenichell certainly has collected and presented a large volume of historical material, so you might find the book useful or even entertaining. The history of plastics is very complex and diffuse, with no single story line, so if Fenichell ever publishes another edition, then my main recommendation after he has cleaned up his technicalities, his style and his prose, is that he includes a timeline in the book. It need not take more than a two-page spread and it could add hugely to the reader's perspective of the subject.

In discussing the benefits and problems deriving from plastics technologies and applications, Fenichell does not take sides, but steers a fairly balanced, if not very analytic, course between the haters and lovers of plastics. My advice is that you read the book if you have a rainy Sunday to fill or a project to write, but don't trust what you read except where you can check the facts and contexts.