Customer Reviews

Eiffel: The Genius Who Reinvented Himself

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We owe Eiffel a great debt just for his Paris tower, but who has heard of his stupendous viaduct at Garabit? His works should be more widely know and this new biography goes some way down that path. It is a well researched book, and exposes much about him as a methodical and systematic engineer who created structures of outstanding beauty and integrity. And he cared about the workers who actually built his designs, a rarity in Victorian times. The book can be criticised for being too brief about his achievements, especially the engineering principles which guided him through his career. And the illustrations are frustratingly sparse and unimaginative for his creations. Some of the early works, for example, are the dramatic viaducts on the Gannat railway, and surely deserve modern pictures (they are still standing and still carrying trains). The book deserves a wide readership, but the defintive bio of Eiffel has yet to be written.

I have one piece of advice for this author: keep yourself to magazine articles. This book suffers from a severe lack of coherency, choppy flow and is a major pain to read. Assuming the facts stated in each sentence are accurate, one needs to take every sentence as a unit and not expect any kind of meaningful transition between different sentences, let alone different paragraphs. If you want to know how a badly written history book reads, here is one for you.

Eiffel: The Genius Who Reinvented Himself isn't just for history buffs: it's an excellent survey of an architect's unique challenges producing a tower which combined the needs of art and industry alike, and as such will appeal beyond history audiences into the arts. Those who know little about Eiffel other than his associations with his famous tower will be fascinated to learn of his collaboration on the Statue of Liberty and the locks for the French Panama Canal, as well as other endeavors. It's the perfect pick for a general-interest lending library collection.

Diane C. Donovan

California Bookwatch