A rare book on engineering and its economics that will satisfy general readers.
A welcome new entry in the how-stuff-works genre.
Everyone knows that roads and bridges are pieces of infrastructure, but so are light switches, sewers, telephone poles, and mailboxes; this imaginative book tells us how they work and what they mean. Writing about her childhood, Chachra, a professor at Olin College of Engineering, chronicles how her middle-class family in urban India received running water for one hour, twice per day, which they collected in buckets for bathing and flushing toilets and boiled for drinking. Electrical brownouts were routine. The author delivers a fine education on the technology that provides a seamless life for the lucky “global 10 percent.” All infrastructure requires energy. The automobile, which speeds us from place to place in a metal shell, requires enormous energy to manufacture and transport to the local dealership, but flipping a light switch makes us no less a human-machine hybrid. Infrastructure is “vast and collective,” but it makes us free. Chachra criticizes the idea of “off the grid,” a life that would be dominated by maintaining personal systems to deal with water, electricity, heat, cleaning, and producing and cooking food. The author devotes the second half of this superbly rendered book to the ongoing problems of her subject. A company can profit by building a pipeline or bridge; legislators boast of promoting it; the media celebrate its opening. Thereafter, like all infrastructure, it requires ongoing maintenance, which is boring and expensive and—all experts agree—wildly inadequate. Due to aging pipe systems, “15% of all clean drinking water in the U.S. is lost to leaks.” Every decade or so, when a bridge collapses, we mourn the victims, but little changes. Turning to “plan for abundant energy and finite materials,” Chachra is more optimistic than most, noting that “we are not doomed to a dystopian future of failing systems.”
A rare book on engineering and its economics that will satisfy general readers.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780593086599
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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