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The moral of this book is that behind every great engineering success is a trail of often ignored (but frequently spectacular) engineering failures. Petroski covers many of the best known examples of well-intentioned but ultimately failed design in action -- the galloping Tacoma Narrows Bridge (which you've probably seen tossing cars willy-nilly in the famous black-and-white footage), the collapse of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways -- and many lesser known but equally informative examples. The line of reasoning Petroski develops in this book were later formalized into his quasi-Darwinian model of technological evolution in
The Evolution of Useful Things, but this book is arguably the more illuminating -- and defintely the more enjoyable -- of these two titles. Highly recommended.
Customer Reviews:
Nice collection of essays.......2007-04-11
The title suggests a coherent essay on 'failure', but the actual content is a collection of essays loosely brought together by the theme 'engineering is about preventing failure'. Some chapters focus on the history of engineering, others on the nature of failure. If one essay bores you, just flip to the next chapter. The articles can be read in any order. All in all, a very thought provoking book.
Tedious answer to a stupid question.......2006-07-04
This book tries to answer the question of why the stuff built by engineers break, what a stupid quesion. Stuff breaks and stops working all the time, that's why we have quality control in factories. If someone thinks we can make something perfectly the first time and every time he must've been born yesterday or smoking. Think about the first plane built or the first car, the first train, the first computer, MP3 players that stops working in a week, umbrellas that flip in the wind... Maybe people don't die when these things break, maybe they do... but this has always been how technology develops---it improves over time.
The title of the book suggests that things built by God do not fail, wrong! Humans get sick, ozone layer gets holes, species go extinct, the Old Man of the Mountain falls flat on his face, and how about birth defects, the list goes on.
Not a well thought out book. And trust me when I say the writing style puts even a true nerd to sleep.
To engineer is human - I engineered a new beverage coaster!.......2006-05-19
I purchased this book at the Duke University bookstore, after the recommendation from a professor at another institution.
Petroski's prose is extremely dense and verbose. His style consists of run-on sentences which require several readings. Even if it is technically (grammatically) correct, it is extremely difficult to read. The subject matter is dry to begin with, however, Petroski does nothing to liven it. I am an engineer also, and am not threatened by the technical information (admittedly lifted from his students' term papers). I have chemical engineering textbooks that read like a novel. Hopefully the courses he teaches are clearer than this muddled prose.
Petroski is certainly an engineer. He has engineered an elegant method of making money from saps like us. I successfully engineered Petroski's book into a beverage coaster to help drown the sorrows of wasting $14 on this book.
Engineering Failures.......2005-04-22
In this book, Petroski brings up a few good points. Engineering is human. Engineers, as oppose to what some think, are not perfect. They are not able to create a perfect design for the given problem. They create what they believe is the best solution for the given design specifications. They, along with others, test their solution, in theory. The majority of these solutions are created and succeed perfectly. Although most of these designs are successful, some are not.
It seems to be most of the failures of designs happen when it deals with something big, including the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways, which killed over 100 people, or the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. These failures become famous and the engineers are the first ones to be looked at.
Along with engineering success comes failure. This is a part of being human. Human engineering will always have its failures along with its successes. When engineers build something, they analyze it to determine if their solution is the best solution. Sometimes it takes a failure for the engineers to see their failures and to correct the problem. This book tries to explain this and does in most cases. In some of the cases, it leaves the reader wondering what else could have been done or what needs to be done in the future to prevent these failures.
Excellent read, but getting old quickly........2004-07-27
The engineer's profession is notoriously fast-paced, and what is exciting today is ho-hum tomorrow. So it is with the failure cases outlined in this 1992 paperback. Not that these cases are dull - far from it! - but when the addendum at the end of this book was written the Challenger space shuttle had blown up and the disaster was just being figured out. Now we have seen the shuttle Columbia break up, as a result of NASA slowly forgetting the Challenger lessons.
With that problem so noted, I still strongly recommend this book as a great read if you want to find out what the business of failure analysis is. It is perfect for beginning engineers and for those who have an interest in the forensics of hardware like aircraft, bridges, and other structures.
Customer Reviews:
Great Book - Pleasure to read.......2007-09-11
This could have been dry subject matter, but it was both interesting and useful. As an avid designer that dabbles in photography, I found this to be a great book.
Good deal.......2006-11-03
The book is more than perfect, its content, the way its written. It was right on time with a big discount, but had a corner a little wrinkled.
Still an invaluable resource.......2006-08-22
I can't remember the first time I read this book, decades ago. Although it's quite dated in light of the advancements in digital photography in recent years, this is still the first reference to check for information about the first 140 years of photography. Even with Wikipedia available, this is the book I check for information. I happened to live in Rochester near the end of his time as curator of George Eastman House, and got to see first hand his influence on the medium. Newhall's book will remain on my shelf for as long as I am interested in photography.
Excellent Reference.......2004-06-03
As a student, I was forced to buy this book during my 2 year tenure at photography school. It remains one of the most comprehensive, detailed and well written references on the history of photography. History books can be a little "dry" to read but this one is exceptionally well written and covers a vast amount of ground in an admirable fashion.
An excellent read.......2003-11-30
If you're even remotely interested in photography and its development, this book is a wonderful way to learn about it. It details the emergence of all the important photographic processes with just enough technical detail to be interesting and not so much as to be overwhelming. There are many pictures in it that provide examples and show how images changed over the years. It also includes the personal aspects of this history and how photography has affected our culture. The writing is smooth and easy to read. In short, I highly recommend it; you won't be disappointed.
Book Description
A unique survey of photography from its origins until now From a delivery boy to one of the most important industrialists in American history, George Eastman's career developed in a particularly American way. The founder of Kodak died in 1932, and left his house to the University of Rochester. Since 1949 the site has operated as an international museum of photography and film, and today holds the largest collection of its kind in the world. The continually expanding photography collection contains over 400,000 images and negatives - among them the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams and others - as well as 23,000 cinema films, five million film stills, one of the most important silent film collections, technical equipment and a library with 40,000 books on photography and film. The George Eastman House is a pilgrimage site and a place of worship for researchers, photographers and collectors from all over the world.
This volume shows in chronological order the most impressive images and the most important developments in the art of light that is photography. It provides in its huge collection and themes a unique survey of the medium from its origins until now.
Book Description
Reflections in Black, the first comprehensive history of black photographers, is a groundbreaking pictorial collection of African American life. Featuring the work of undisputed masters such as James VanDerZee, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems among dozens of others, this book is a refutation of the gross caricature of black life that many mainstream photographers have manifested by continually emphasizing poverty over family, despair over hope. Nearly 600 images offer rich, moving glimpses of everyday black life, from slavery to the Great Migration to contemporary suburban life, including rare antebellum daguerrotypes, photojournalism of the civil rights era, and multimedia portraits of middle-class families. A work so significant that it has the power to reconfigure our conception of American history itself, Reflections in Black demands to be included in every American family's library as an essential part of our heritage. A Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2000, and a Good Morning, America best gift book of 2000. 600 duotone photographs, 32 pages of color.
Customer Reviews:
Reflecting African American Life.......2001-07-28
... For more than a century, according to Deborah Willis, curator of photography at the Smithsonian, black photographers deliberately used their work to counter prevailing racial stereotypes and enhance racial pride. Her monumental portfolio of photographs by these artists, studio owners, and itinerant "painters with light" does more than counter stereotypes; it defies attempts to generalize about its subject.
People in this arresting collection of pictures are caught up in all kinds of ordinary pursuits--reading, working, dining, marrying, praying, talking, playing games, posing in lovely clothes, getting haircuts, making music or speeches or dinner--in a spirited, generally trustful relationship with the camera. Clearly Willis's criterion as she selected photographs was, as she says in the text, "expressive power."
Still, white Americans viewing these pictures are likely to bring to the experience the same old images of slavery, Civil Rights marches, and past or present media caricatures of black life that they've drawn from school and popular culture all their lives. Perhaps the delightful photographs of children in the book will take on ominous overtones because we know of future trials the childish mind can't predict. But such a reaction can keep us from realizing that what's on the child's mind may be partly the point.
For example, two Boston children have been posed in front of ornate ironwork, wearing starched lace dresses (it's 1910) and starched bows in their hair. They look beautiful--and stiff, and miserable! Good little girls, they've let Mother dress them up today, but they seem to want to tear off those enormous bows, jump the iron fence, and tumble around on the grass like anyone else their age.
Another example: Malcolm X crouches to hold his two daughters in his arms. He's talking to little Attallah, his eyes warmly upon her. But she turns away from her father's handsome face to stare unhappily at the audience, as if asking us just to go away for a change and give her some private time with Dad.
If the original vitality in these photographs can't keep us from calling up the preconceptions we carry around with us, this may actually be useful. The book's very freshness about what seems familiar makes us realize how old and worn-out our assumptions can be. Thus the photographs can (as Willis says in her introduction) "create a new ý historical consciousness that has the power to rewrite history itself."
But "Reflections in Black" is more than a documentary that can provoke useful debates within ourselves and between groups interpreting past or present culture. It shows that despite their commonalities black photographers have a long history of debating with each other. Is their medium an art or an engine of social progress? Should photography make mementos for its subjects or involve and change its viewers? The competing purposes and conflicting angles of vision represented in the book are part of what makes it fascinating.
Best of all, the book is marvelous for simply wandering and wondering through:
A remarkable series by a photographer who eventually lived in Seattle presents a man in three poses- - seated for his formal portrait, then hanged for murder, and finally laid out in his coffin.
Women in the book are gloriously unpredictable. Billie Holliday rehearsing with Count Basie looks like a Fifties coed in sweater, plaid skirt, and ponytail. Zora Neale Hurston smiles like an angel instead of with her usual impish brass.
Men? None are alike. A nattily dressed man waits at a bright window, fedora tipped up to let in the view, papers gleaming mysteriously in the background. A lined, leathery cowboy smokes a cigarette, his arms roped with tendons. Seattle's own Jacob Lawrence looks like a serious man at twenty and equally serious midway through his life, midway up a stepladder, in reverie.
Elsewhere, a lonely stony beach caresses the eye with dark grays and liquid silver. And beside a brick building draped with a gigantic sky-blue banner painted with the face of Malcolm X, a black cowboy rides through a golden field.
Perfection is truly hard to find, but.............2001-07-08
"Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, from 1840 to the Present" comes awfully close. The photos vividly chronicle the Black experience in America. From the famous to the not so famous, all the joys and sorrows of a people are marvelously presented in this exquisite document. The accompanying text is entertainingly informative. The authors have truly outdone themselves.
I will be purchasing a few copies for friends. Others, I will tell to get their own.
It's THAT GOOD!
Reflections: Finding Strength and Dignity in Our History.......2001-05-01
Beneath the blanket of cultural arrogance that - even today - refuses to acknowledge the contributions made by its own citizens, is a truth that has been beautifully presented here by Ms. Willis. The images and text fully support what writer Richard Wright wrote, that, "OUR HISTORY IS FAR STRANGER THAN YOU SUSPECT, AND WE ARE NOT WHAT WE SEEM." Brava, Ms. Willis, and thank you.
Highly recommended, comprehensive, specialized history........2001-01-05
This history of black photographers covers 1840 to modern times, presenting a wide-ranging set of images and social and artistic observations which should intrigue a diverse audience, from artists to those interested in black history. Black and white images accompany in-depth text coverage of the artists and their times in this first comprehensive history of black photographers.
Scholarly and thrilling.......2000-09-21
This fabulous book deserves all of the praise it has earned. In addition the final chapter, "Photography of the 1980s and 1990s," includes an amazing section of modern art photgraphy, unmatched in any other photography collection in print today. Astonishing and utterly original works of young African American photographers Albert Chong, Pat Ward Williams, Chris Johnson, Terry Boddie, and Calvin Hicks are just a few highlights. In addition, Ms. Willis, a MacArthur Fellow, brings a clear, assured, and scholarly voice to her narration of this wonderful collection. No public or school library can afford to be without this book. The notes and the index are terrific. Also worth mentioning is that the prints are big enough, the paper is top quality, and the color reproduction is excellent. Deserves more than five Amazon stars.
Book Description
Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), the brilliant French physiologist, developed photographic techniques for the study of animal locomotion that directly influenced the invention of cinematography. His work and the images he created are among the very sources of modernity, yet his own history and background remain obscure. Marey's strange story emerges in this fascinating account of a voyage of scientific and aesthetic study that would have reverberations in many aspects of modern culture. Dagognet, a philosopher, focuses on the meaning of Marey's work, on being able to capture a trace of the usually invisible world of motion, for aesthetics and science.
Marey succeeded Claude Bernard (whose passion for recording opened the frontiers of cinema and modern art) at the Academy of Sciences. There his central preoccupation led Marey to search out increasingly accurate and sensitive methods for "fixing" motion so that its details could be studied. Around 1880 and after a meeting with Muybridge, it became clear that photography, the possibility of a snapshot, would furnish Marey with the ideal instrument for his studies. Not only the gallop of a horse but also the flight of bird, the quivering of insect wings, the bounce of a ball, the slightest of turbulences - all could all be made to stand still: from the invisible came the image.
François Dagognet teaches epistemology at the University of Lyon. Among his previous publications are Philosophie de l'image and Rematérialiser. Zone 6: Incorporations includes his essay "Toward a Biopsychiatry."
Book Description
This unique book takes a thematic approach to twentieth century photography by focusing on the major developments of the 20-year periods into which the book is divided rather than on individual photographers. Photography 1900 to the Present presents excerpts from a cross-section of writers in the fields of photographic criticism and history on topics relevant to each period with the overview of each section providing a context for the art and culture of that era. The book also includes a timeline to exhibits, books, technical innovations, and professional organizations of each period. It also includes a bibliography of major periodicals dealing with 20th century photography. This enables readers to access current information on contemporary photographers. A valuable reference book for any reader interested in the evolution of 20th century art and photography and its impact on society.
Average customer rating:
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150 Classic Cameras: From 1839 to the Present
Paul-Henry Van Hasbroeck
Manufacturer: Sotheby's
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The Horse: Photographic Images, 1839 to the Present
Gerald Lang ,
Lee Marks , and
Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence
Manufacturer: Harry N Abrams
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ASIN: 0810934078 |
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Open Secrets: Seventy Pictures on Paper 1815 to the Present
Manufacturer: Fraenkel Gallery/Matthew Marks Gallery
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ASIN: 1881337030
Release Date: 1997-09-02 |
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Edited by Jeffrey Fraenkel and Matthew Marks.
Customer Reviews:
Beautiful and enchanting works of art.......1999-11-05
This wonderful book is full of many beautiful and inspiring images. Paintings, drawings, lithographs, silkscreen, photographs, among other mediums hold the thoughts of artists such as Pollock, Warhol, Matisse and others. A truly wonderful little collection of ideas.
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Out of the Forties
Nicholas Lemann
Manufacturer: Smithsonian
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ASIN: 1560987723 |
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- U.S. Regulation of the International Securities And Derivatives Markets: United States Regulation of the International Securities And Derivatives Markets (2 Volume Set)
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