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In choosing to write about the history of an idea, the author has undertaken one of the most difficult of historical tasks, and it?s no wonder it took him the better part of fifteen years to complete the book. Biographies start and end with the subject?s life. Histories of a particular technology have similar well-defined limits. But the history of an idea, especially an idea as multifaceted and chameleon-like as cybernetics, can easily turn into a cat-herding expedition. Fortunately, the author is a masterful historian who knows his way around archives and among the ways of researchers, and he explores the many meanings and ramifications of the cybernetics concept from its birth to the 1980s, by which time most of the early participants had either died or returned to their respective traditional disciplines. Because cybernetics involved so wide a range of disciplines, researchers, and institutions, the author has trouble maintaining a clear story line through the book. It is not fair to say that the total is less than the sum of its parts, but the nature of his subject forces te author to run back and forth along the historical timeline as he takes up different aspects of his subject. Perhaps the book will be most valuable as historical background for the large number of disciplines that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science, communications engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology. While cybernetics as an independent discipline has largely vanished from the scene, many concepts and disciplines that are still with us today were born in, or at least influenced by, the chaotic and exciting times when the term held great promise and unlocked the coffers of research foundations of the 1950s. Even when research is funded as part of a fad, it can still do some good, and that may be the best lesson to be learned from The Cybernetics Moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]