Hammack writes with admirable clarity, authority, and wisdom.
An informative book about how the impulse of engineers to solve real-world problems is the source of progress.
Hammack, a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois and the award-winning creator of a YouTube channel called engineerguy, has the ability to break down complex subjects into simple steps. In this insightful book, he tackles the broad subject of engineering and how it underpins the world we live in. He believes that all engineering stems from a number of “rules of thumb,” and the aim is always to make something that works. “The scientific method creates knowledge; the engineering method creates solutions,” he writes. Progress occurs through systemized trial and error based on careful observation. This is not to say that engineers disdain science and mathematics but only to note that their emphasis is on the practical. Hammack points to several cases in which the underlying scientific principles were only worked out after an invention was up and running. Another strategy is to build on past knowledge, including the inventions of others. For example, the light bulb could not have been developed without the tungsten filaments that had already been invented. Another rule is to accept trade-offs. Engineers must balance constraints to arrive at an optimal—not necessarily perfect—solution. An invention might not have the theoretical elegance of a math equation, but the engineer doesn’t care as long as it gets the job done. Hammack explains his material in straightforward language, and in the concluding chapter, he makes a case for engineering to take place within a moral and ethical framework. The engineer’s capacity to make things that function well should be leavened by public debate on what shouldbe done, and an understanding of the processes involved. “To engineer,” writes the author, “cuts to the core of being human.”
Hammack writes with admirable clarity, authority, and wisdom.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-72821-575-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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