The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another—Ainissa Ramirez (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2020, 328 pp.)

If ever there was a book that fit so neatly into the theme of this magazine—the social implication of technology—this is it. Author Ainissa Ramirez, a Stanford PhD whose background is in materials science, describes how a number of different materials were shaped by individuals, and how the resulting technologies that used these materials, in turn, shaped society. In short, the alchemy of matter begets the alchemy of us.