Volume 4, Number 3 · March 11, 1965
A Christian Materialist
By E.J. Hobsbawm
The Conquest of the Material World
by John Nef
University of Chicago, 408 pp., $8.95
The scientist's best chance of immortality is to become an adjective: Newtonian or Darwinian. His next-best chance is to become a brand-name: Avogadro's Law, Fourier series. Few historians have much hope of becoming either, but they can succeed in getting their names firmly, often indissolubly, linked with a particular problem, phenomenon, or period. Professor J. U. Nef has for some thirty years occupied a corner of this kind. Every college student who takes a history course automatically associates—or ought to associate—the words 'Nef' and 'indusrial development in the sixteenth century.' He has now republished his main papers on this and congnate subjects, somewhat revised in the light of his more recent views.
Review, 1413 words
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