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Title: Starts Promising, Ends Up Whiny
Review: This book starts promisingly. The introduction to materials science from prehistoric toolmaking is fascinating, and coupled with fun anecdotes about the author's childhood interest in materials. It's fun to hear about the way he tortured a shatter-proof bowl into breaking, and to get a very readable explanation of the science of what went on.What's not fun is the account of his later career. While at the very end he reveals that he meant this account to be a critique of the American system of funding technological research, it comes off as a whiny account of why the author didn't get the post-docs and grants and academic respect he should have gotten. It's the worst sort of academic pomposity.On the other hand, he manages to make some complicated science about materials fracture quite understandable and interesting. So if you want to learn about that, then get the book and skim through the parts about the author.
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