ENGINEERS' DREAMS

A series of highly readable portraits of unexecuted projects in which all Mr. Ley's talents as an entertaining, factual explainer of science for the layman, come to the fore. Nine chapters make a substantial round-up of plans engineers have made but have never carried out- for political or financial reasons, through the last century and a half. To mention a few, there are seadrome islands for transocean air refueling stations;a tunnel under the English Channel; irrigation of the Jordan River Valley; harnessing power from the sun; the refilling of Lake Chad in Africa. Though the reasons behind their failures are mentioned only in passing, there is more than enough fascinating material on the project itself- written with a clear idea of its mechanisms and an engineer's own feeling for natural fact and world benefit. Diagrams by Mr. Ley are supplemented with many drawings by Isami Kashiwagi; This should go well.