Review : Mystic machinery

3 January 1998

David Noble’s latest history traces the ascetic and millennarian religious
impulses driving Western technological progress. From the Carolingian
re-evaluation of the “useful arts” to the Masonic invention of modern
engineering and the rapturous imaginings of America’s Cold War warriors, The
Religion of Technology is a thorough, if humourless, antidote to the feeling
that our machines are driving themselves. Published by Knopf, $26, ISBN
0679425640.