Building the World: An Encyclopedia of the Great Engineering Projects in History [2 volumes]

This monumental two-volume encyclopedia of great engineering projects will be of interest to a great variety of readers.The book takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through time and space. The narrative spans a period of 30 centuries--from the completion of Solomon's Temple in 960 B.C. to the completion of the Big Dig in 2007. The projects extend to six continents--from Egypt's Aswan Dam, to India's Taj Mahal and North America`s Alaska Highway. The technologies represented range from "no-tech" in the founding of Baghdad, to "low-tech" in the Protective Dikes and Land Reclamation in Holland, and to "high-tech" with NASA and the Apollo Program.The book will be captivating to the general public as well as to experts. For example, having lived a dozen years in Paris practically in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, this reviewer naturally considered himself well-informed about this monument and its history. But I learned a great deal from the book. In "Building the World," one finds out that the Tower's construction in the 1880s was opposed by some of France's leading artists--including the writers Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola, and the composer Charles Gounod. They signed a petition calling the Eiffel Tower a monstrosity. Originally the Eiffel Tower was meant to be torn down after 20 years; but it still stands proudly today. And it has been visited by over 200 million people.The authors obviously selected with great care the 41 macro-engineering projects that appear in the book, and the quality of the documentation is impressive. "Building the World" is a magnificent piece of work.

Co-authored by Frank P. Davidson of the Center for Advanced Engineering Studies at MIT. Davidson was the mastermind behind the Channel Tunnel project, one of the real wonders of the modern world, but he never made a penny off of his efforts. My own mentor in projects studied and taught under Davidson and concluded, "in the project business, the last thing you want to do is to get labeled a 'promoter'". This is what happened to Davidson, one of the greatest engineering minds of the 20th century. I bought these two volumes so my students could use them as a springboard to research modern projects. Wonderful purchase.

I had spoken with one of the authors and looked forward to reading the book. I loved it. It explains the backgrounds of many great engineering works throughout the world. In two oversize volumes, it is a large book; yet I wished it were even larger, large enough to include the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the Pantheon, the development of trans-Atlantic trade routes, the rerouting and control of the Rhine, the airline reservation systems, the GPS network, the unraveling of the genetic code, the Large Hadron Collider, the New York City transit system and, of course, the Internet. In addition to its wealth of information about how works were authorized, I wish it had more about how works were designed and implemented. It remains a unique and masterful book.