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A review by hilaritas
The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure by Henry Petroski
3.0
This is basically a book written by your rambling grandpa who used to be a civil engineer. It's got some really interesting facts about the history of infrastructure sprinkled throughout, but they're buried in a text that is otherwise disorganized, dry, and weirdly pedantic. Petroski feels the need to devote many pages to defining basic terms everyone knows or describing objects familiar to everyone. He has a whole paragraph defining a "shunpike", as though you can't figure out that it just means that people don't like to pay tolls, for god's sake!
The book is "organized" around the verses of Robert Frost's famous poem, but all this means is that a phrase from the poem titles each chapter, although the chapter itself likely has f@*k-all to do with the quote. Indeed, many of the chapters don't even have an internally consistent theme, but instead appear to be a stream-of-consciousness riff on whatever vaguely infrastructural topics occurred to Petroski that day.
It's a maddening thing, because out of this senescent miasma occasionally emerges a coherent and cogent thought, where he will say something intelligent about the ways in which the political process or public/private collaboration impacts infrastructure projects. Then, it's back into the soup! I really wish someone could have grabbed Petroski by the lapels and forced him to write a better book about this topic, rather than turning in these half-baked musings. This topic is inherently fascinating and he's clearly a well-informed guy, or at least he was before senility crept in...
The book is "organized" around the verses of Robert Frost's famous poem, but all this means is that a phrase from the poem titles each chapter, although the chapter itself likely has f@*k-all to do with the quote. Indeed, many of the chapters don't even have an internally consistent theme, but instead appear to be a stream-of-consciousness riff on whatever vaguely infrastructural topics occurred to Petroski that day.
It's a maddening thing, because out of this senescent miasma occasionally emerges a coherent and cogent thought, where he will say something intelligent about the ways in which the political process or public/private collaboration impacts infrastructure projects. Then, it's back into the soup! I really wish someone could have grabbed Petroski by the lapels and forced him to write a better book about this topic, rather than turning in these half-baked musings. This topic is inherently fascinating and he's clearly a well-informed guy, or at least he was before senility crept in...