Bridge Books

this is an excellent book for people with an intrest in the history of bridge construction and their design from the roman times to the modern bridge with lots of black and white illustrations.anybody who likes bridges will like this book.

This reprints a 1929 classic in an unabridged presentation covering the design and construction of spans around the world, from wooden landmarks and classic restored medieval structures to covered bridges, stone structures, and modern (up to early 1900s, that is) creations. Chapters pack in many vintage black and white photos and diagrams to accompany a technical survey of bridge advancements and construction.

I have read quite a few books made from journals of individuals in Vietnam. Most are either dry accounts of movements or almost novelized disjointed experiences. This Book "The Bridges of Vietnam: From the Journals of a U. S. Marine Intelligence Office" Is not only chronologically organized, but also has a list of external events that took place at the same time.

With out a frame of reference it would be hard to tell if he was barging or borrowing someone else's idea of Vietnam. However in chapter Three "Internship" he covered the same territory (II Corps TZ) as I did; only he was there six months earlier. I saw his reference to the Fourth Infantry with out any reference to the armed reconnaissance First of the Tenth attached to the Fourth Infantry. I also spent some time in other locations and he does a good job of describing daily life. It looks like he left out how to do the job he does and maybe some things he did. For the most part he was dead accurate as to the people and environment of the time. He makes you feel that you are there.

This book is well worth reading and then keeping as a reference. Especially as time passed and you forget your first taste of warm "33" beer.

Fred Edwards served as an intelligence officer during the Vietnam War and visited very major ground unit from Special Forces camps and ground reconnaissance unites, to armored calvary units, and waterborne reconnaissance units. An invaluable and strongly recommended contribution to the military annals of the Viet Name conflict, Edward's The Bridges Of Vietnam: From The Journals Of A U.S. Marine Intelligence Officer is as vivid and candid memoir of the war from the perspective of a front-line intelligence officer as is available to the non-specialist general reader or military buff.

Over fifty famous bridges and their stories are gathered in a survey which will appeal to a far wider audience than the usual specialty bridge book. Here is a satisfying blend of striking photos and technical detail blended in with a history of bridge-building around the world. The real surprise lies in a lively writing style paired with discussions of bridges in regions which usually don't receive much mention, such as a sand-cast iron bridge in Coalbrookdale from the 1700s or the 1800s Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol.

I bought this book for my son who is almost 5. He is fascinated by bridges. So I got this book for him and he loves it. It has some really unique bridges with great pictures. (He likes it mostly for all of the pictures, but he will ask what country they are from, etc). I also find it interesting because they have detailed descriptions regarding the bridges.

So this is a great book, even if you have never had interest in bridges. Kids like it too!

The author's approach to bridges is descriptive, easy to read, and gorgeously illustrated. The book includes lush illustrations and diagrams on every page. I particularly liked the later chapters on failure as a tool (Firth of Forth bridge), and the big spans (Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges). Adkins discusses social forces as well as physical forces acting on bridge design and construction, in an engaging manner. I plan to use parts of this book in my high school engineering design class as background reading on bridge design.
Chapters:
Stone and Wood
After the Caesars
Figuring Forces
Iron and Steel
The Big Spans
Compression and Tension
Glossary

Kids ages 9-13 years will find this accessible and inviting: a coverage of bridges around the world, with a healthy degree of simple engineering basics added to make the history appealing. The lively text and black and white drawings do a fine job of explaining differences between bridge construction and different builder achievements.

This is a superb selection of the best short stories written by expatriate writers living in Japan. It is also the first such selection and promises some rare treats to readers unfamiliar with both the writers and the topic. There is a broad range of both topics and literary styles, by both well-known and previously unanthologized authors.

Anyone who writes for a living knows the first and foremost rule: write what you know about. The authors in this collection of short stories certainly know what it's like to be outsiders looking into a foreign culture. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country can identify with these rare glimpses into battered hearts which results from the initial over-idealisation of an adopted culture. The writing is superb and colourful and each story feels like a poignant confession. One thing which is missing; however, is the lure of the culture and the aspects which keep us all living in foreign countries. Hats off to the editor.She did a remarkable job of bringing all these stories together. If you enjoy good writing of any kind, you'll cherish this book.

Karen Hesse is back, baby! A person only gets so many golden opportunities in their life, you know. There are only so many times you get a chance to say that someone's back. Someone who may have taken a small vacation from writing for a while. Karen Hesse is a good example of this. She's done some picture books and short stories but her last novel, Aleutian Sparrow came out in 2003. Now she's returned to the field in force and with a full-length no-verse-in-sight middle grade novel on her hands. I mean Hesse was always the queen of verse. Her Out of the Dust won itself a Newbery, and I cherish in a soft place in my heart The Music of Dolphins. I guess you could say it was my favorite Hesse book . . . until now. Brooklyn Bridge takes a fancy to the summer of 1903. A time of bears, Coney Island, hot nights, and sharp delicious pickles.

To hear fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom tell it, everything was fine before the bears. Yeah, his family wasn't rich or anything. His dad ran a candy store and they were like everyone else in their neighborhood. They made do. Then President Roosevelt had to go and NOT shoot a bear and everything went wrong. His Dad got this crazy idea about making stuffed bears out of cloth instead of wood or metal and suddenly everyone and his brother wanted one! Now Joseph's dad never has time to do little things like take his kids to Coney Island, and with all the family drama Joseph's feeling a little shut out. Paired alongside Joseph's thoughts are stories of a group of street kids that live underneath the Brooklyn Bridge at night. Haunted, both literally and figuratively, by a past tied unknowingly to Joseph's, their story highlights the boy's newfound status.

The book has a large cast of characters, all of them single-minded and interesting. All three of Joseph's aunts act and react off of one another in ways that have become almost rote over the years. Pay close attention to when Hesse chooses to switch between their nicknames ("The Queen", "Aunt Beast", and "Aunt Mouse") and their real names. That's a lesson in narrative power right there. As for other family members, Joseph's younger sister Emily is the wise one in the family, a fact that both she and Joseph recognize without animosity on either end. Really, that was one of the best parts of the book. The sheer levels of affection between different family members. Even when they're fed up or frustrated with one another, you can feel a deep and abiding love there. The family of the Michtoms is also mirrored in the rag tag family of stray kids under the bridge. There's loyalty in both groups, though one seems like a pale knockoff of the other.

As for the writing itself, Hesse using the two narratives (Joseph's vs. the kids under the bridge) to try things out. Joseph's story is straightforward with little poetic asides but nothing overly lyrical. The bridge kids get all the pretty words, maybe to make up for their crummy little lives. A boy who feels affection for a girl simply called The Bride is described as, "close to no one until The Bride came, the white-necked bride, who no longer wore her hair pinned up in the fashion of a lady, but down, in one thick braid, like a farm girl from Nebraska, like the mother he'd never known." Or about a small girl who, for reasons unknown, once drank poison. "She just cried. Silent tears rolling down her cheeks, her eyes two green bruises in a dusky face." Simpler still, just the use of an adjective at the right point makes all the difference in the world when closing out a chapter. "... and the sun rose, evicting the sharp-shouldered children from under the bridge for one more day."

I say that the novel is prose rather than verse, but that isn't to say that Hesse's poetic sensibilities have taken a back seat. No sir! Not she. The novel splits into two separate narratives. On the one hand you have Joseph, his life, and his worries. And on the other hand you have the children that live under the Brooklyn Bridge and their stories. Now, when you compare Joseph's woes (woes = how his parents are too busy to take him to Coney Island) to the woes of the kids under the bridge (woes = drinking acid, sleeping with corpses, stealing, madness, and worse), you'd be naturally inclined to think that Joseph was going to come across as a pretty whiny kid. He thinks HE has problems? Has he ever heard of Mattie, a boy who knew about "eating things no one should eat"? Hesse, however, is exceedingly clever. First of all, for a lot of kids reading this book, they're going to sympathize with Joseph. Having parents so consumed by their professional lives that they fail to spend enough time for their family? Not exactly a non-existent problem today. Fact of the matter, I'd say that most kids that read this book would identify more closely with Joseph than someone like Mattie. But by pairing his frustrations alongside those of the homeless street kids, Hesse is able to keep returning to the notion of being lucky. The very first sentence in this book is, "The guys say I'm lucky." For immigrants coming to America for the first time, you needed luck. The kids under the bridge don't have it and Joseph does, and on some level he's aware of this even if he isn't aware of the specific existence of the kids themselves. At one point in the tale Joseph's little brother gives a small girl his bear. Once he does so he's amazed by the amount of freedom he has. And then Joseph thinks to himself, "What bear had I been carrying . . . And what would it take for me to let it go?" Even the lucky ones amongst us have bears. It's the letting go that's difficult.

Spoiler alert, by the way. I was also amazed that Joseph never ran across the kids under the bridge. There's one moment where he passes Guy on the street, but it's a throwaway moment for him. He barely registers the kid's existence. And yet, his own story, the one that waits until the end of the book to be told, is tied very closely to the story of the bridge kids. This, if anything, was the weak point of the book. The sudden reveal at the end that the ghost under the bridge is Joseph's cousin? It felt like it came out of left field. If Joseph had been feeling guilty about this role in the boy's death, shouldn't that have been alluded to in ways that are less oblique than the ones found here?

It's an older book than Hesse's others. There are references to nasty things done by Cossacks to young girls, and children beaten until they almost die. It's never explicit and never described in any depth, but there's enough to cause me to suggest that maybe this book would be more appropriate for the older set. The 12 and up crowd, perhaps. This is perhaps one of Hesse's most accomplished novels. It's historical fiction that uses the past as a point of reference rather than as the point of the novel. Hesse is weaving together so many seemingly disparate elements and living breathing characters that the end result feels more like a film, a theatrical production, or a scene on a city street than a book for kids. I use the word "beautiful" when describing works of fiction because it's a difficult term to justify. But this book is beautiful. Beautiful and weird and real in a way that will touch you. If five-year absences yield books as fine as this, I urge every writer to take an extended vacation pronto.

My Review of BROOKLYN BRIDGE by Karen Hesse

Well worth the five year wait, award winning author Karen Hesse's new book, Brooklyn Bridge, is a memorable mix of historical fiction with a trace of enchanting fantasy. Hesse introduces this immigrant tale with a quote by Isaac Newton:" We build too many walls and not enough bridges". This quote could be considered "a spoiler" if one could interpret its relevance prior to reading the story. However, readers must finish the book in order to see what Ms. Hesse means by using this quotation symbolically in relation to the actual Brooklyn Bridge and humanity, especially in the special era she wrote about.

In the early 1900s, the family of fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom has come from Russia to settle in America where the streets are made of gold. His is the typical lively and colorful family who has come to live the immigrant life of 1903 Brooklyn. Joseph who has a pretty good life for a kid in those days, filled with stick ball, a good home, family and lots of friends, is blessed but his dream centers on going to the new and thrilling amusement park known as Coney Island. However, Coney Island must wait. The Michtom family, in Joseph's mind, is doing fine with their candy store when suddenly his Dad gets an idea that instead of making toy bears out of metal or wood, they should be made of cloth. Before you can say `teddy bear', the idea takes off and the family is swamped with the demand for these bears. Joseph's family time is now devoted to this new "invention" and there is no time for Coney Island much less his "regular" boyhood life of friends and frivolity.

Interspersed between the chapters that tell of Joseph and his family and friends comes the haunting story of the kids who live under the bridge. Karen Hesse writes of these somewhat mystical children in a different, almost poetic way. Theirs is a life of suffering and misery which includes their individual stories of horror, starvation, pain, and even death. The central character under the bridge is one known as the Radiant Boy who glides in like a phantom spirit and frightens the children as they know that when he comes and takes someone with him, the child never comes back. How these children relate to Joseph's story is almost like a parallel universe in that Joseph doesn't seem to even meet any of these kids or acknowledge their existence for the most part. Their connection to Joseph, however, is one that is subtly alluded to throughout the story but it isn't until the end that the reader will see the significance of this story within the main story.

What is the connection between the kids under the bridge and Joseph? As for Coney Island, does Joseph ever get there? As you read this remarkable work by Karen Hesse, the answers to these and many more questions just may satisfyingly and incredibly be revealed. I recommend this as a perfect book for children 11 and older, as well as for adults who want to learn more about a time when our ancestors migrated to this country and settled in that magical place in New York known as Brooklyn. For those of us who know the area, the allure and magnificence of Coney Island and the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge will never cease to exist but rather be enhanced and remembered by reading Karen Hesse's novel, Brooklyn Bridge.

Chris Sheban did the wonderful cover art and adds to this amazing book with his interior illustrations as well.
Submitted by Karen Haney, August, 2008

Brown Eyes Blue is a wonderful book about the relationships that women have....with other women, with men, and with themselves. It made me think about the choices I have made in life, my expectations regarding romance and the times I have sold myself short. The characters are wonderful! This is the perfect book for a book club to read and discuss. I strongly recommend it.

At last, thanks to Carolyn Meyer and her remarkable first adult novel Brown Eyes Blue, we have a poignant, pithy story, rife with recognizable relationships among women spanning three generations, where the heroines are not all under forty with violet eyes. In fact, arguably my favorite character is Lavinia, an artist in her eighties who is scandalizing both family and community in her sleepy Pennsylvania town by her switch from painting bucolic country scenes to bringing naked men to life in full frontal view.

My five children grew up reading Meyer's award winning books for pre-teens and teens (she's written forty nine of them), and I read them through the years to keep pace with my kids developing knowledge of powerful women in the pantheon of world history. Meyer's many works on famous queens contributed to my daughters' belief that they could be anything they wanted to be and tweaked their imaginations as they donned regal garb to present plays in the garage and relegated their two brothers to playing their courtiers and jesters.

Now at last, Meyer has brought her vivid characterizations to life in a novel for me. In Brown Eyes Blue, through Lavinia, Dorcas, and Sasha, Meyer presents the difficult, often daunting, three generational family sandwich so many of us have lived through or are living. Dorcas, in her mid-fifties and struggling with her own dramatic change of life issues of career and romance, is caught off balance between an outspoken and hypercritical elderly mother who is showing signs of senility and a needy, twenty-something daughter whom Dorcas thought was safely launched into adulthood but who arrives back on mom's doorstep, seemingly the same troubled teenager who left home several years before.

As with her children's books, Meyer's novel is spare with overblown description that bogs you down but rich with metaphor and realistic dialogue that takes you there.

As someone who was once a Sasha, who has very recently played the role of Dorcas and who one day can only hope to be as colorful and entertaining as Lavinia, I feel highly qualified to recommend Brown Eyes Blue to other avid readers of fiction. It's a wonderful read and one can only hope that Carolyn Meyer is at work on her sequel.

I read this book over 45 years ago while completing my undergraduate studies in Engineering. I have never forgotten it!! The significant substories within the book describe the development of wire rope; the construction of the first successful suspension bridge across the Niagara Gorge; the details of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge; and the comparison of the sway bracing of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and its ultimate fate. These could all have been the subject of separate books and each was facinating in itself.

This fascinating book descibes the the story of the brooklyn bridge in New York, and the story of their builders, the roebling brothers. Roebling had the great idea of building a bridge not with stiff beams, but with two big soft ropes made of fibers of strong and elastic steel. An idea, which now is used with nearly all Bridges of wide span. I love this book, because it is not an engineering report, but the touching story of the life of mainly the elder Roebling brother, who dedicated his health and his life to this bridge.

I could read this book nearly 40 years ago, and still it is one of my favorites. I do not posess it, and I deeply regret that it is not available any more. Hopefully AMAZON can find some and put them on their stock...

Good book to read to kids who are nervous about meeting other kids. Whenever I read this book out loud to my first grade class, I notice an incredible change in how they interact with each other. I would love to see more books by this author.

Lisa Shook Begaye adds credibility to this writing since she has actually lived on an Indian Reservation. "Building a Bridge" teaches a subtle lesson without being "preachy". It gives our children an illustrated look into the Native American culture and shows how a simple activity such as playing with building blocks can be a first step in uniting us all. It has become one of my children's favorite stories. Debi Brim (dbrim@infocom.com)

I'm just a beginner learning Bridge by all different means - computer programs, books, and so on, but not with real people and not on-line yet. This book is teaching me more than any other book I've seen or read, and I'm really beginning to understand the game PLUS the reasons behind the bidding and play, thanks to this book. I really can't say enough good things about this book. If you're learning Bridge, I highly recommend it, and while you're learning, please drop me a line, too. (PLEASE NOTE CORRECTION IN MY E-MAIL ADDRESS) P.S.: I've been teaching my 13-, 12-, and 9-year-olds out of this book, too, and it's easy enough for them to understand

I learned bridge the way most people probably do-- some friends taught me how in college. After I'd been playing a year or two I bought this book which made the reasoning behind some of the rules I'd been following blindly and altered radically my own approach to teaching the game to others. It's also generally fun to read and one section flows nicely into the next. My one complaint: The edition I have is printed on very cheap paper and I'm not sure how long it will last. Hope it comes back into print soon!