From the Ferris wheel to the integrated circuit, feats ofengineering have changed our environment in countless ways, big andsmall. In Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering, DukeUniversity's Henry Petroski focuses on the big: Malaysia's1,482-foot Petronas Towers as well as the Panama Canal, a cutthrough the continental divide that required the excavation of 311million cubic yards of earth. Remaking the World tells the stories behind the man-made wondersof the world, from squabbles over the naming of the Hoover Dam tothe effects the Titanic disaster had on the engineering communityof 1912. Here, too, are the stories of the personalities behind the wonders, from the jaunty IsambardKingdom Brunel, designer of nineteenth-century transatlanticsteamships, to Charles Steinmetz, oddball genius of the GeneralElectric Company, whose office of preference was a batteredtwelve-foot canoe. Spirited and absorbing, Remaking the World is acelebration of the creative instinct and of the men and women
The national park system ranks among our most magnificentachievements and the story of its creation reveals how the Americanlandscape shaped our history and character and continues to do soalmost 175 years after painter George Catlin first proposed “anation’s Park.” In these lavishly illustrated pages, award-winning author KimHeacox chronicles our changing visions of wildness from the 17thcentury, when the first settlers built towns around shared commons,to 1916, when the National Park Service initiated a new kind ofcommon–unspoiled parkland held in trust for Americanseverywhere. Here are explorers like Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and John WesleyPowell, who reported wonders so amazing they were met withdisbelief. Here too are farsighted leaders like Thomas Jefferson,Theodore Roosevelt, and other sponsors of such parks as Yosemiteand Yellowstone. In spectacular counterpoint, 100 illustrations unveil a pristinenew world that awed the artists and photographers from EadweardMuybridge to Ansel Adams. An
