I read so many glowing reviews of this book on Mastodon and so I opened it up. I felt the same way as the above Amazon reviewer. The book just felt shockingly naive. His book was driven by his personal vision/ideology moreso than any actual accordance with scientific or social scientific learnings. If you're suffused deeply enough in the ideology I'm guessing Dartnell is evocative, but if you're skeptical, Dartnell doesn't do nearly enough work to convince you otherwise and often makes you giggle and lose faith with his inaccuracies (like the formula for black powder lol) and impractical takes.