A NUMBER OF IN teresting new books have arrived in our offices lately, and this column is devoted to recommending the best of them. To make them easier to get hold of, we have made it possible to order them through us: See the box at the end of the facing page.

• The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology

by Carroll Pursell, Johns Hopkins University Press, 358 pages, $45.00. CODE: JHP-3

“So many topics, so little time.” Carroll Pursell uses this phrase as a motto, and his list of publications through the years shows an extraordinarily wide range of interests. Few scholars, then, are better equipped to tackle his book’s ambitious subject: a complete history of technology in America, from the arrival of European settlers to the present.

Pursell, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, details the give-and-take by which technologies and social institutions influence each other. For example, consider the 1930s shift to mechanized agriculture. In the Corn Belt, three technologies came together to make the change possible: the mechanical corn picker, mass-produced gasolinepowered tractors, and hybrid corn with ears of uniform height. Lacking affordable tractors to pull them, or facing a crop without standardized dimensions, mechanical pickers could never have succeeded. As with any work of such broad scope, readers can quibble about the omission of this event or that discovery. Still, it would be hard to find a better introduction to the history of American technology—or, for that matter, to American history itself.

• The Last Steam Railroad in America

Photographs by O. Winston Link and text by Thomas H. Carver, Harry N. Abrams, 144 pages, $49.50. CODE: ABS-8

Between 1955 and 1960, whenever he got a chance to leave his commercial photography studio, O. Winston Link went to Virginia to document the passing of the steam age on the Norfolk & Western Railway. Some of the results were published in 1987 as Steam, Steel, and Stars . As that title implies, Link preferred to work at night, when he could control the lighting for his carefully planned and painstakingly composed shots. Now a further selection from Link’s 2,400 negatives has been published, this time including daytime photos and even two dozen color pictures.

These last are an especially pleasant surprise. Steam railroads seem to exist in a black-and-white universe; as Link put it, “The engine was black, smoke is white, steam is white, cars are black, track is black, night is black. What am I going to do with color?” He found plenty to do, from capturing the striking foliage on the Abingdon branch to using a switchman’s red lantern as a dramatic accent in a night shot.

Thomas H. Carver, who assisted Link and is now an art curator and historian, gives an account of Link’s life and work and describes the world he devoted years to recording. Carver also provides technical details on the equipment they used, explaining how Link achieved his cherished deep focus and synchronized scores of flashbulbs with a 1/400-second exposure. For photography buffs, rail fans, or anyone with a coffee table, The Last Steam Railroad in America is well worth the hefty price.

• America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 1910-1945

by Stephen L. McFarland, Smithsonian Institution Press, 312 pages, $29.95. CODE: SIP-3

Between Kitty Hawk and Hiroshima, America made impressive advances in producing military airplanes and building ever-more-destructive bombs. Combining the two, however, posed a harder problem: how to deliver those bombs to a small area while flying at hundreds of miles per hour, thousands of feet in the air. As Stephen L. McFarland shows, it’s a problem the U.S. military never quite managed to solve.

World War II Army fliers, using their celebrated Norden bombsights, achieved mixed results at best: A typical raid saw fewer than half its bombs land within 1,000 feet of the target. As a result, the Army often resorted to area bombing, in which masses of planes dropped huge loads of ordnance in hopes of hitting something. For their much smaller targets, Navy pilots got around the accuracy problem with dive bombing, which was a lot more lethal for those on both ends of the attack.

Interservice rivalries compounded the problem. Carl Norden’s contract was with the Navy, which would not let the Army deal with him directly. Norden himself caused headaches with his insistence on craftsmanship over mass production, mechanical over electronic solutions, and direct over alternating current. Some simple answers were found: When bombsights were in short supply, the Army put one in the lead plane of each formation and had it signal the others when it was time to release their loads.

The book bogs down a bit during the 1920s and 1930s, as McFarland details which department ordered how many sights from which manufacturer on what date. It picks up considerably, though, when World War II starts. A recurrent theme is the debate over the propriety of dropping bombs on civilians, whether intentional or not—until the Manhattan Project changed everything. Today “smart” bombs have made strategic bombing a reality by using laser guidance, but the problem of achieving precision targeting with conventional gravity bombs remains unsolved.

• Engineers of Dreams: Building Great Bridges

by Henry Petroski, Alfred A. Knopf, 496 pages, $30.00. CODE: RAN-36

There’s something about a bridge. Few more conspicuous examples can be found of the engineer’s art, and few in which the underlying structural problem is so apparent. No wonder, then, that writers on engineering are drawn to bridges the way Ken Burns and Stephen Jay Gould are drawn to baseball. Now Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke, has taken his cuts.

Sandwiched between an introduction and a summary are chapters on five prominent engineers, each one’s life serving as a framework for the story of his era. James Buchanan Eads and his bridge at St. Louis illustrate the transition from iron to steel and from informal to formal training. Theodore Cooper’s 1907 bridge collapse in Quebec shows how the familiar factors leading to disaster cropped up even in a “scientific” age. Gustav Lindenthal and Othmar Ammann typify the intertwining of engineering and politics: The irascible Lindenthal spent decades lobbying for a span across the Hudson River, which Ammann, quieter and more politically skilled, eventually got to build. Finally, David Steinman provides a counterpoint to Ammann: a maverick, unskilled in networking, who succeeded by selling himself to the public rather than building support among decision makers.

Just as a good bridge weds sweeping visual grace with detailed mechanical calculations, Engineers of Dreams exhibits a rare mixture of eloquence and precision. That combination has made classics of Petroski’s previous books, and his latest deserves no less of a reception.

• Dashboards

by David Holland, Chronicle Books/Phaidon Press, 224 pages, $39.95. CODE: CRN-6

When you talk about classic automobile design, people usually envision the sensuous lines of a Duesenberg or an Alfa Romeo. Yet elegance can be found on the inside of a car as well, nowhere more prominently than on the dashboard. From the utilitarian Model T and opulent Cord 812 to the rakish 1950 Chrysler New Yorker and bulbous 1955 Chevrolet Corvette, dashboards have expressed their makers’ aesthetic visions every bit as much as tail fins or two-tone paint jobs. David Holland demonstrates this truth with a very handsome photographic collection of dashboards through the years, along with a few hood ornaments, door handles, and other assorted doodads. Every design fashion of the twentieth century shows up here, as car interiors re-create the atmosphere of drawing rooms, diners, and space capsules. The result is a thing of beauty and an invaluable aid to those who like to envision themselves behind the wheel of an Isotta-Fraschini Tipo 8A.