Stephen L. Sass's The Substance of Civilization shows that the story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires. How would history have unfolded without glass, paper, steel, cement, or gunpowder? Sass shows us how substances and civilization have evolved together. In antiquity, iron was considered more precious than gold. Spanish miners in the New World thought platinum, which is more rare than silver, a useless nuisance. The celluloid used in movie film had its origins in the search for a substitute for ivory billiard balls. The discovery ages ago that clay could be fired to make pots was revolutionary; so was the more recent discovery that clay also contains the substance that runs our computers.

From the discovery that heating changes the atomic structure of clay resulting in ceramic (because of the loss of water and hydroxyl molecules), to today's world of silicon chips and advanced synthesized polymers, Sass (materials science, Cornell U.) mixes archaeology, history, and materials science to show how the physical properties of different substances has affected the drift of civilization. He discusses the development of weapons, tools, building techniques, and information technologies within the context of the science behind why certain materials are suited for different uses. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Remember when you learned about the Stone Age, followed by Bronze and Iron? Well, it didn't exactly stop there, and Sass, a Cornell materials-science professor, is our guide to all the successive wonders of luck, pluck, and technology that have enabled us to move from cave days to today's steel-polyethylene-and-silicon world. Moving chronologically, with some time out to explain what makes metal metal or introduce notions like yield strength, plastic deformation, and dislocations, Sass treats the reader to a materials-science course for the layperson, laced with lots of didja-knows: Did you know that smelting copper often meant releasing toxic arsenic gas, which is probably why Hephaestus in the Iliad is described as lame? That ``carat'' comes from the Greek keration, for locust-pod tree, because the dried pod nearly always weighed 200 milligrams (now the standard)? In short, there are gobs of wonderful trivia as well as accounts of the technological innovations that led to ever hotter furnaces, blown glass, steel from iron, and all the latter-day wonders, from synthetic rubber, celluloid, and rayon to aluminum alloys, Kevlar, plastics, silicon chips, and composites. How each of these material discoveries and inventions affected society is an important subtext_but the point of view is largely apolitical. (The reader will infer that building bigger and better arms, however, has clearly been a strong motivating force for material invention.) Sass is not always successful in getting the reader over technological hurdles; there are pages of photos (unseen), but the text could surely use diagrams as well. What he does_and does well_is convey the richness of the material world and the ingenuity of humankind in making use of it.