Book Review – Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization – Minh Quang Duong

Ed Conway wanted to talk about the six raw materials that he thought were the most important in the evolution of our society, such as sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. The author beautifully covered a brief history of how each material was discovered, how it contributed to the progress of our society and what the economic and geopolitical implications are. You can tell that he did a lot of research from the content and how he broke down some very complex concepts into digestible pieces. Writing a book on this topic is not easy, I imagine. Going too deep into the weed will make the text dry and you’ll lose the audience’s attention. Staying too broad and high will lose all the interesting points. Same outcome. Ed struck the right balance here.

I picked up this book because I wanted to understand, from the ground up, what are driving the significant developments around the world. People have been talking non-stop about AI and Large Language Models. To enable such technical achievements, we need the best possible chips. Which materials are instrumental to making those chips? Lithim, cobalt, nickel etc…Chips and servers consume a lot of power. What electricity runs on? Copper! Say what you want about renewable energy and how much we want to curb climate change, but the world still runs on oil, not wind or solar. Plus, can we live without salt? Can you imagine a world without glass which is made from sand? And how would we build anything without iron or steel?

Leave a Comment