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Reviews
| Building the World: An Encyclopedia of the Great Engineering Projects in History, 2 vols. By Frank P. Davidson and Kathleen Lusk Brooke. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006. xxiii+450 pp. (vol. 1), ix+488 pp. (vol. 2), illus., maps, refs., bibl., index. $199.95 hb (ISBN 0-313-33354-8).
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Building the World is a two-volume, wide-ranging reference work dealing with macroengineering projects, that is, those engineering projects that were among the largest and most technically complex accomplished at various periods of history. After a short introductory essay on the nature of large-scale engineering projects, the work focuses on 41 of humanity's major building projects, ranging chronologically from Solomon's Temple (10th century B.C.) to the recently completed Channel Tunnel and geographically from Baghdad to Boston and beyond. The entries vary in length, from around 10 pages (e.g., Trans-Siberian Railroad, London Bridge, and the Canal des Deux Mers) to nearly 70 pages (The Central Artery/Tunnel Project or "Big Dig").
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The 41 individual articles deal with a variety of large-scale engineering projects: cities, aqueducts, canals, railroads, dams, and communications satellites, for example. The projects are arranged chronologically. Each article is divided into sections. The first section—Did You Know ... ?—is a compilation of interesting facts about the project under discussion. For example, one of the interesting facts about the Suez Canal is that around 120,000 people died during its construction. Sections on background history, cultural context, planning, building, and historical significance follow. The authors provide each entry with an extensive set of references: books, articles, internet sources, and even—for some—relevant music (since Verdi's opera Aida was composed to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, it is listed in that entry's reference section) and film resources (often documentaries). Finally, after the references, each entry has a selection of original documents relating to the origin of the project. For the founding of St. Petersburg, to provide just one example, the authors reprint an extract from the journal of Tsar Peter the Great. Well-captioned photographs accompany every entry. Tables and maps accompany many entries (although more tables and maps would have been helpful).
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In any work of this sort, the authors can be questioned about why certain engineering projects were included, while others were left out. Why was Solomon's Temple included but not the Parthenon or the Pantheon? Why include China's Grand Canal but not its Great Wall? Why does the founding of Cyrene in Libya merit an entry but not the founding of Alexandria in Egypt? Why were the dams on the Colorado River and the Tennessee Valley included but the equally challenging large-scale dam projects built at approximately the same time on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest or the Dnieper River in the Soviet Union excluded? Why are the Brooklyn and London bridges afforded chapters but not any of a number of later massive bridge projects in the United States, Japan, or Turkey? Does a semiconductor manufacturing consortium really belong in the volume? There is, of course, no way that any set of selections could please everyone, and the authors do note that the work is intended to be "illustrative rather than comprehensive" (p. xix). Nonetheless, one of the collection's most serious flaws is the authors' failure to explain and justify the criteria that led to inclusion and exclusion, other than a brief note on p. xi indicating that inclusion "hinged on the survival of the founding document in each case." This criterion raises more questions than it answers. Is "survival of the founding document" a good screening mechanism for "an encyclopedia of the great engineering projects in history," as the volume's subtitle reads? The volumes are also a bit too American-centered. American projects comprise more than one-third of those included.
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Although I clearly have reservations about the authors' selections and selection criteria, and the set is pricey, I still think this is a good and useful reference work. It is not intended to be a contribution to cutting-edge scholarship, but it provides a historical scholar beginning a project about certain large-scale engineering projects with a very good place to start. Moreover, the entries are well-written and genuinely fun to read, especially for those not familiar with the history of civil engineering. I found myself pulling the volume down from my bookshelf and reading another entry or two—just for enjoyment—when I had a few minutes between various commitments during the process of preparing this review. Almost every entry has something to pique the general reader's interest.
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