Product Description

Here are two dozen tales in the grand adventure of engineering from the Henry Petroski, who has been called America’s poet laureate of technology. Pushing the Limits celebrates some of the largest things we have created–bridges, dams, buildings--and provides a startling new vision of engineering’s past, its present, and its future. Along the way it highlights our greatest successes, like London’s Tower Bridge; our most ambitious projects, like China’s Three Gorges Dam; our most embarrassing moments, like the wobbly Millennium Bridge in London; and our greatest failures, like the collapse of the twin towers on September 11. Throughout, Petroski provides fascinating and provocative insights into the world of technology with his trademark erudition and enthusiasm for the subject.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92499 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-13
• Released on: 2005-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400032945
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Petroski (The Evolution of Useful Things) again meets his usual high standard when it comes to writing about technology, but this collection of articles from American Scientist, some dating back to the early 1990s, never quite coheres as a unified text. The tendency of chapters to drift toward soft conclusions isn't disruptive in the first half of the book, devoted to bridges around the world, but the second half, which encompasses subjects ranging from the creation of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, to the destruction of the World Trade Center, becomes noticeably choppy, especially when Petroski attempts to wrap things up with millennial reflections that already feel dated. The book also fails to deliver on the promise of its title; though many of his examples, especially in the bridges section, pushed the limits of engineering in their day, they can hardly be called new. (One notable exception is a long chapter on China's planned Three Gorges Dam, which also demonstrates Petroski's skillfully light touch at travel writing.) But the most glaring flaw is the frustrating paucity of illustrations (only 29)—the meticulously detailed descriptive passages can go only so far in conveying a sense of awesome beauty. At his best, Petroski is a charming guide to the landmarks he admires, and it's a shame that the presentation falls short of his talent.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Norman Mailer, a onetime engineering student himself, once remarked that "Physics was love, engineering was marriage." He was right. A physicist looking at a bridge sees gravity pulling relentlessly down while the atoms in the iron and concrete squeeze against each other to exert a countervailing force and keep the bridge standing. An engineer looking at the same bridge will see some of this, of course, but will see a lot of other things as well. He or she will see the economic factors that dictated the use of materials, the complex strategies that had to be worked out to keep the structure standing during construction, the endless permits and forms that had to be filled out before the first shovelful of dirt was turned over, the court cases brought by environmental groups, and all the other elements that had to be dealt with before the grand principles of the physicist could be realized in this particular structure.

Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, has made it his calling to help the rest of us see the world through the eyes of the engineer. He has been called, deservedly, the "poet laureate of engineering." Pushing the Limits is a collection of essays, first published in somewhat different form in the American Scientist, that amounts to a kind of intellectual travelogue in which he shares with us an engineer's-eye view of everything from obscure bridges to crazy (and as yet unbuilt) structures that have been proposed by engineers in the past.

Petroski is an engaging writer, clearly in love with his subject. I enjoyed this book immensely, so let me get a minor criticism off my chest. It wasn't until page 257 (in the author's acknowledgments) that I learned that I was reading a book of collected essays. An earlier statement would have saved me a lot of trouble trying to figure out what the connection between chapters was. Once I figured it out, I could take each chapter as a self-contained unit (as was originally intended) and enjoy the book for what it is.

The first half of the book is taken up with a discussion of bridges. These are some of the most dramatic built structures in the world, not least because they often occur in dramatic settings -- harbors, gorges and the like. Petroski begins with a historical survey stressing bridge design as a creative activity -- "The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas" -- and goes on to point out fascinating details for each bridge he considers. I was amazed to learn, for example, that the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York is so long that the curvature of the Earth makes the tops of its towers a full inch farther apart than their bases, and that when the Pont de Normandie was completed across the mouth of the Seine in France, 80 fully loaded trucks were parked on it nose-to-tail to test it before normal traffic was allowed to cross.

Two local bridges made Petroski's list -- the Arlington Memorial Bridge (he seems to have a special weakness for drawbridges) and, of course, the new Wilson Bridge which is now somewhat farther along (thank God!) than when these chapters were written.

This is not a triumphalist book. The engineering character has a certain gloomy side, a side that delights in contemplating all the things that can (and do) go wrong with structures. So we have the standard discussion of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington, whose collapse in a windstorm in 1940 was captured on film and is routinely shown to engineering students, as well as discussions of bridges that have failed during earthquakes. This is interesting stuff, especially when Petroski contrasts the way we deal with airplane failures (keep all the pieces until we've wrung the last drop of information from the debris) to the way we deal with collapsed structures (bulldoze the site and rebuild ASAP).

The last half of the book deals with an astonishing variety of other structures, from the Three Gorges Dam going up in China to the deadly collapse of the bonfire at Texas A&M University in 1999. The most interesting of these chapters was a stroll through some truly wild ideas that have been proposed by engineers in the past. My favorite: a 1928 scheme to build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar and shrink the Mediterranean, thereby adding real estate to Europe and North Africa. (I'd like to see the Environmental Impact Statement for that one.)

In the end, what we have here is a fascinating potpourri of history, engineering and imagination, all presented in the fluid, humane writing style that we have come to expect from this author.

Reviewed by James Trefil
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
The prolific and popular Petroski has also been an essayist for American Scientist magazine. This collection of his articles contains parallels to the author's Engineers of Dreams (1995), which explored America's totemic bridges. Bridge building may again be his dominant theme, but this time Petroski plumbs structures whose fame tends not to extend beyond professional engineering circles. People have been driving over the floating bridges of the state of Washington, the bridges on Oregon's coast, and the drawbridges of the Potomac River virtually oblivious to the wonderful stories they are speeding past. Petroski's essays, in which he pauses to consider their design and particularly how they stretched previous engineering experience, are as insightful and delightful to read as any of his full-length books. In addition to bridges, Petroski's pushing-the-limits title encompasses structures that have disastrously failed (the World Trade Center, Texas A & M's bonfire in 1999) or whose imagination is more durable than the likelihood of constructing them, such as a dam at the Strait of Gibraltar. Also profiling on-the-edge engineers such as Santiago Calatrava, Petroski again applies fine styling to the hardheaded world of civil engineering. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Mostly Bridges
This book is a worthwhile addition to Petroski's accounts of adventures in engineering. His many essays on the possibilities of gutsy achievement in large scale engineering is leavened by cautionary tales of overconfidence and hubris. His stories are especially enlivened by his lacing some of his personal experiences with encountering the structures with erudite discussions of the technical challenges faced by the engineers and sometimes lyrical peans to the beauty of the artifacts they had created.

I especially appreciated his chapter on his visit to the Three Gorges--a place I hope to visit soon. And the one about London's Millennium Bridge and the Wheel was tops too.

On the other hand, it is apparent that the book is rather unevenly done. It is a collection of essays that do not tie together very well. The chapter on fuel cells near the end of the book seems quite out of place and pedantic to boot. And while the book has 28 illustrations, most of them are pretty cheesy--it really needs more and better pictures.

But overall, I enjoyed the book and I'll be using it to enhance my visits to some of the same places that he describes so well.

Engineering Successes and Failures
It's pretty clear that Mr. Petroski likes bridges. I do to. In fact I just recently drove many miles out of my way to go see the new Sundial bridge designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in Redding, California. My one complaint here would be that I'd sure like to have seen more pictures. His words are elequent, his descriptions great, but remember the bit about picture and a thousand words.

Bridges take up about half the book. then he goes on to describe an eclectic collection of engineering projects that don't quite fit together but which make nice little essays of their own.

Interesting enough, a couple of his essays cover engineering projects that failed. In his interestingly named Vanities of the Bonfire, he gives an engineering report of the collapse of the stack of logs that made up the 1999 bonfire at Texas A&M. It would be very amusing except that it killed a dozen people and injured several more. Consistent with todays law suit environment, it is now estimated that a new bonfire would cost between one and one and a half million dollars.

A valuable perspective for a layman
I have been reading Dr Petroski's books for a long time. I was particularly struck by the study of the Texas A&M Bonfire collapse. I was impressed that he went beyond the "nuts and bolts" of physicial studies of materials and failure analysis. The comments on psychological factors was insightful and engaging.

Highly recommended