Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Science/Engineering


"Petroski has an inquisitive mind, and he is a fine writer. . . . He takes us on a lively tour of engineers, their creations and their necessary turns of mind." --Los Angeles Times

From the Ferris wheel to the integrated circuit, feats of engineering have changed our environment in countless ways, big and small. In Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering, Duke University's Henry Petroski focuses on the big: Malaysia's 1,482-foot Petronas Towers as well as the Panama Canal, a cut through the continental divide that required the excavation of 311 million cubic yards of earth.
Remaking the World tells the stories behind the man-made wonders of the world, from squabbles over the naming of the Hoover Dam to the effects the Titanic disaster had on the engineering community of 1912. Here, too, are the stories of the
personalities behind the wonders, from the jaunty Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of nineteenth-century transatlantic steamships, to Charles Steinmetz, oddball genius of the General Electric Company, whose office of preference was a battered twelve-foot canoe. Spirited and absorbing, Remaking the World is a celebration of the creative instinct and of the men and women whose inspirations have immeasurably improved our world.

"Petroski is America's poet laureate of technology. . . . Remaking the World is another fine book." --Houston Chronicle

"Remaking the World really is an adventure in engineering."
--San Diego Union-Tribune

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Images of an Engineer Alfred Nobel's Prizes Henry Martyn Robert James Nasmyth
• On the Backs of Envelopes Good Drawings and Bad Dreams Failed Promises
• In Context Men and Women of Progress Soil Mechanics Is Technology Wired?
• Harnessing Steam
• The Great Eastern Driven by Economics
• The Panama Canal
• The Ferris Wheel Hoover Dam
• The Channel Tunnel
• The Petronas Towers

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Petroski, perhaps best known for The Pencil (LJ 3/1/90) and The Evolution of Useful Things (LJ 12/92), here collects columns written originally as essays for American Scientist, an engineering society publication. As such, the 18 selections, aimed at raising the reader's consciousness about how important and far-reaching engineering is to civilization and society, are accessible to a lay readers with an interest in technology and society. Several pieces are about particular engineers (e.g., Henry Robert, who wrote the Rules of Order, was first a military engineer) or engineering projects (the Channel Tunnel, the Ferris Wheel); others are provocative (the flaws of engineering software, the creep of technology). Always well written, though seldom off the "engineering is crucial!" soapbox, this is an excellent choice for general collections with a literate readership interested in technology‘and a good gift for the engineers on your Christmas list.‘Mark L. Shelton, Univ. of Massachusetts Medical Ctr., Worcester (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In this roundup of columns from American Scientist, bestselling author Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke Univ., exhibits the graceful style and flair for storytelling that he brought to The Pencil and Engineers of Dreams. In this volume, he deals with big projects such as the tunnel under the English Channel (Chunnel), the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal and the 1858 launch of the iron ship Great Eastern, which laid the Atlantic cable. He shows how creative design, inspired improvisation and technology translated raw idea into finished product. He celebrates well-known figures like George Ferris, who built the famous wheel for the 1893 Chicago world's fair, as well as neglected innovators such as Galveston, Tex., military engineer Henry Robert, best known for Robert's Rules of Order. Especially provocative is a cautionary essay on the potential dangers of misplaced reliance on computer software. He also argues that, according to provisions of Alfred Nobel's 1895 will, engineers should be eligible for the Nobel Prize. Petroski not only identifies the social and cultural context in which engineers operate but also convincingly dramatizes engineering as the triumph of human will, ingenuity and persistence. Photos. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Petroski, an eloquent elucidator of engineering, here gathers 19 of his magazine essays. He is no stranger to a fan base built on such gracefully written foundations as The Evolution of Useful Things (1992) and Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (1995). In each essay, Petroski grabs the reader's attention from the first paragraph, in a manner germane to engineering, such as wondering why a famous photograph of an engineer--a jaunty Isambard Brunel posing in front of huge chains for his ship the Great Eastern is today a hot-selling postcard. But quoting Keats is not the trip on a tangent that it first seems; Keats enables Petroski to delve into the construction of the Panama Canal. Such specific projects concern most pieces, ranging from the Ferris wheel to the Hoover Dam, but several themes run throughout this consistently enchanting collection. Petroski dismantles the image of the engineer as an analytical automaton building at will, as uncreative, or as less important than the pure scientist, a perception exemplified by engineering's exclusion from the Nobel Prizes, which, ironically, were established by an engineer. With such themes subtly connecting a stimulating variety of topics, Petroski's collection provokes and pleases. --Gilbert Taylor

Kirkus Book Review

A disappointingly flat collection of musings on engineering history. Petroski's concern, as in previous works such as The Pencil(1990), is the interdependence of engineering and society--the role of engineers in shaping the world we live in, but also the fact that engineering's achievements are driven not purely by technology but by economics, politics, and culture. But in demonstrating these truths through chronicles of great engineered projects and portraits of interesting engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he largely leaves out the ingredient that would really enlighten the reader--the engineering itself. ""The tapering at the top of the building demanded some especially tricky structural engineering,"" Petroski hints, with regard to Malaysia's Petronas Twin Towers, the world's tallest. But he leaves it at that, satisfied to provide a sketchy account of the building's materials and facilities, and a slight chronology of the project. Similarly, ""improvements in tunneling, such as the chore of getting rid of the soil,"" would seem to be a main topic in the history of the Channel Tunnel, but that phrase appears merely as a transition in Petroski's lifeless parade of 19th-century tunnel plans. Without using his tantalizing examples--pioneering soil mechanicist Karl Terzaghi and the rise and decline of the transatlantic steamship--to explain any engineering principles, they remain little more than aimless encyclopedia entries. Perhaps this is because they were written for a scientifically oriented audience (most appeared in American Scientist), with the intention of highlighting the historical and social context. Still, only occasionally, as in a chapter using the various uses of wireless communication to illustrate the unpredictable evolution of technology, do they seem to ascend above the assembled facts to a salient idea. Petroski is a little petulant about the respect engineering gets (as from the executors of Alfred Nobel's bequest), but he's squandered an opportunity to propagate a real sense of the science and labor of builders and inventors. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Henry Petroski is an American engineer with wide-ranging historical and sociocultural interests. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1968, and became Aleksandar S. Vesic professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University. Petroski teaches traditional engineering subjects, as well as courses for nonengineering students, that place the field in a broad social context. One of the major themes that transcends his technical and nontechnical publications is the role of failure and its contribution to successful design. This is the central theme in his study To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, which is accessible to both engineers and general readers. This theme is also incorporated into Petroski's The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990), which relates the history of the pencil to broader sociocultural themes. The theme is expanded further, illustrating the relationship of engineering to our everyday life in The Evolution of Useful Things (1992). Petroski's most recent book, Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering, is planned for publication in 1994. After that, he will begin a study of the complex interrelationships between engineering and culture. Widely recognized and supported by both the technical and humanities communities, Petroski's work has effectively conveyed the richness and essence of engineering in its societal context for the general reader.

(Bowker Author Biography)