A definite must read for engineers or like-minded geeky people.

I found this book surprisingly practical, too. On a recent trip to Seoul, I read the whole chapter on the evolution of the fork on the plane, just as I was struggling to eat my in-flight Korean meal with chopsticks. It made me wonder how the West ended up with a fork while Asia went with something completely different. Right about then, the chapter talked about the evolution of the chopstick. Neat!

You can learn a lot about the development of culture from studying the development of our most basic tools.