Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering [Paperback]

Henry Petroski (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1400032946 | ISBN-13: 978-1400032945 | Publication Date: September 13, 2005 | Edition: First Vintage Books Edition

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Vintage Books Edition edition (September 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400032946
• ISBN-13: 978-1400032945
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #215,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. The author of more than a dozen previous books, he lives in Durham, North Carolina, and Arrowsic, Maine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mostly Bridges, September 24, 2004

By 

Donald B. Siano (Westfield, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engineering Successes and Failures, November 3, 2004

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A valuable perspective for a layman, January 29, 2006

By 

Bufford D. Moore (Baytown, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering (Paperback)

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