Customer Reviews

Demolition: The Art of Demolishing, Dismantling, Imploding, Toppling and Razing

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Well, BLOW ME DOWN!!

Finally, a "consumer" oriented book about EXPLOSIVE DEMOLITION! I've been hoping for such a book as long as I can remember! I just purchased my copy today (12-27-00), and have had nothing short of a BLAST with it! The photos are truly stunning, not only of the actual implosions, but also the close-ups of the drilling, placing the explosives, and other preparations, as well as the explosives themselves. Excellent section about the history of explosives in general. The vast array of structures shown being imploded, toppled, etc. is truly awesome. I also like the little pictures at the lower corners of the pages. If you flip the pages fast, these images act like an old fashioned "flip book" animation. Flip them the wrong way, though, and the building appears to rise out of its rubble! Very innovative. The diagrams of the Kingdome implosion were also very informative.

The text throughout the book is also extremely informative. Living just across the street from a 1 1/2 story hospital building that was recently demolished conventionally (and shaking the h**l out of my house a couple of times), now I know why it couldn't be imploded (a building must be at least 5 stories for a successful implosion).

The sections on "conventional" demolition were also extremely enjoyable. There are many books about heavy equipment, but very few of them actually show equipment built or modified for demolition (e.g., wrecking ball, hammers, jaws, long-reach booms, etc.)

The bookstore where I bought my copy had several in stock, but I anticipate that it will be a very popular title, as it is the first book about the subject oriented to the general public. Again, it does a really great job of showing how the Loizeaux Family and CDI deal with one BLASTED THING after another! And it was fun, fun, fun when the Loizeaux's blew the building away!

This book has a lot of very nice pictures and some text to go along with them. However, other than the part about the Kingdome demolition, the reader is given few details about how the demolition of a structure was done and what the various considerations were in deciding the exact methods used. An equation or two would have been informative...

This book is quite a blast, literally, because it gives the reader some first-hand knowledge of how the building demoltion process takes place. And it shows this with some clear pictures and diagrams. The Kingdome implosion, in particular, stands out because of the level of detail that went into explaining it. All in all, this is a great book to give the budding young engineer or to keep on the family coffee table.