THE COTTON INDUSTRY -- THE STEEL INDUSTRY (Nos. 5 & 6 in America at ork Series)

Supplementary school texts, with a vast accumulation of facts and figures, which still fall to give a well-rounded picture of these two of America's greatest industries with all of their problems of growing, mining and manufacture. The human aspects of workers in fields or in mill towns are ignored and the vast accumulation of detailed processes from seed selection to the use of by-products, from iron-mining to blast furnaces, are not merged into an effective whole. Photographs of numerous machines for ginning and spinning (in the cotton book) are drab and uninteresting. Diagrams would have been more effective. (Photographs for the steel book not submitted). In the steel book I felt the need of a glossary for all the technical terms. In spite of their drawbacks I learned much in reading these books. Too bad they aren't better.