Had he more simply explained the flaws and virtues of the various bridge designs, he would have succeeded not only in...
A great idea: The story behind the Brooklyn Bridge, Golden Gate, and a score of other marvels of late-19th and 20th century engineering genius.
If only Petroski (The Pencil, 1990; The Evolution of Useful Things, 1992) had spared some of the detail and added more diagrams to illustrate basic principles and controversies. Indeed, civil engineering was the daughter of the Industrial Revolution, an empirical science evolved to meet the needs of rapid transport by rail and internal combustion engine. It was by no means certain that designs for longer and longer spans and higher and higher towers, using newfangled raw steel and concrete materials instead of masonry, would literally hold up. And failures there were. Cantilevered bridges were out following the collapse of a bridge in Scotland; suspension bridges had to fight their way back to respectability after "Galloping Gertie" the Tacoma Narrows Bridgetorsioned itself to death in high wind. But it is the people Petroski cares about: the engineer-dreamers whose names, except perhaps for the Roeblings of Brooklyn Bridge fame, are unknown. So his chapters center on half a dozen greats: men like James Eads, who bridged the Mississippi; Gustav Lindenthal (New York's Hell Gate); Othmar Ammann (the George Washington Bridge); and David Steinman (Marcinac Bridge), the names in parentheses only the best known of their contributions. They, their partners and rivals, the politicians, bankers, and public interest groups, the construction workers and the general public animate the tales that Petroski tells. They are part of his ongoing crusade to celebrate engineersin this case a particularly ardent, outspoken, and ambitious lot who truly dreamed of spanning the world. To his credit, Petroski paints his heroes' flaws as well as their virtues.
Had he more simply explained the flaws and virtues of the various bridge designs, he would have succeeded not only in honoring engineers but also the science of engineering.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43939-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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