Read via NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic. It’s out in September.

The thing about this book is the thing about almost all of the Object Lessons: if you asked a random person, a short book about concrete should not be this enthralling. Because most people do not spend all their time thinking about concrete, even if – perhaps because – they are surrounded by it all the time.

And yet. Parnell shows that the history and cultural context of concrete is compelling. That it speaks to questions of modernity and sustainability, memorialisation and objectification, capitalism and whether aesthetics matter and the ramifications of controlling the literal building blocks of a society.

I enjoyed reading this and I learned an enormous amount. Will I still wander around oblivious to the amount of concrete around me? Will I still ignore all of the ways it’s used and what it actually looks like? A lot of the time, probably, yes; it’s hard to retrain your eyes and expectations. But every now and then I will look across a city, or consider a building site, and I will think about how concrete works under tension, and whether the use of concrete has helped divorce builders from their materials, and how environmentally problematic the use of current concrete is, as well as how incredibly useful it’s been over the last couple of centuries. And those are good things.