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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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