Bridges and Tunnels Books

The way Malachy Murry brings the reader closer to New York and the great history behind the big city is both exceptional and breathtaking. If you have the slightest interest to know anything about New York - this book comes highly recommanded.
In mid-August this year my wife and I had the pleasure of taking the full tour with Circle Line around Manhatten and our tour guide, Mr Murray, made that the most interesting, informative and enjoyable tours we've ever attended.
Thank you,
Janne & Trond, Norway

Visited NY the last of August for the first time. Malachy was the tour guide on the Circle Line boat tour my son and I took around Manhattan. For everyone who thinks history is boring, you will thoroughly enjoy how he gives you a recap of the how's,when's, where's, and why's of NY. This book models the tour talk he gives while you look around at all of the history and famous sights.
It's light reading that leaves you with an education! He published this by himself so enjoy a handmade product full of his humor and unique twist on the Big Apple. Want to know where that phrase came from? This is where to look!

I ordered Malachy Murray's book after meeting him aboard the Circle Line Tour Boat on August 30th on the 4:30 pm tour. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. The book itself is truly unique in that it covers information and facts that a person would never know about unless they delved deeper into archives or lived the experience. Worth every penny and much, much more. My trip to NYC began on the Circle Line and will continue for months while reading and rereading "Unique New York"
John P. Hayden

If you ever get to NYC, take the Circle Line Tour and request his tour. He's great! He's funny, informative, serious, inspirational and takes great pride in his city.

We were lucky enough to get on a boat of the NY Circle Line where Malachy Murray held a microphone in his hand - and the attention of his audience as well. He made history come alive, and through his colourful comments on NYC the two hours on that boat went by without a boring minute.
This book is a fabulous way to remember this great tour of Manhattan, providing anecdotes and facts, and all of it in Malachy Murray's unique style.
Well done, Malachy :-)

This is honestly a great book, it helped me. Im fairly new to model railroading (only about 4 years) and it has honestly made me into the goto guy (within my model railroad club) for bridges and tunnels. It covers all sorts of wierd and wonderfull ideas for your layouts. A GREAT resource and addition to any model railroaders libary.

This book is an excellent guide to model railroad bridges, trestles, and tunnels. It presents all types of construction including wood, stone, iron, concrete, etc and all era's from the early 18th century to the present.

Many prototype photographs and illustrations are used to show the different types of bridges. You don't have to be a civil engineer to read the book, but it will give you a very good detailed view of each type of bridge.

Each section in the book ends with information on how to model these structures. This includes construction details including sources for the needed products. Information is also included on how to finish the products.

When I now see a bridge while traveling I have good knowledge of why and how the bridge was constructed.

I am not a modeler (at least yet) but I think this book will appeal to both novices and more experienced modelers. I have two other similar books and this book is by far the best of the three. I highly recommend it.

As a 28 year veteran of professional railroading, with 18 years in the bridge department, Jeff has indeed managed to bridge the gap between prototype and modeler. He explains in great detail the "why" that goes into selecting the proper type or size bridge for a particular location. Many beautiful bridge models are spoiled because they would just not be practical in the real world. Jeff did an excellent job of researching the subject material and has made it easy for a modeler to build a very nice, prototypical bridge for a given geographic location.

The Model Railroader's Guide To Bridges, Trestles & Tunnels is an in-depth hobbyist's guide to adding minutely detailed, realistic bridges and tunnel portals to a model railroad layout. Chapters include overviews of the construction and purpose of bridges, trestles, and tunnels; historic and contemporary prototype photos, in black-and-white and color; strategies for modeling, painting, and weathering scale replicas; listings of bridge, trestle, and tunnel kits in HO, N, and O scale, as well as excellent suggestions for modifying kits and scratchbuilding; and so much more. An in-depth guide that combines an appreciation of railroad history with solid how-to tactics for bringing said history to life.

In this first book, "Bridge and Tunnel" John Hennessy's rich language takes us through the industrial landscape of New Jersey with humor, heart, and a sharp eye. He introduces us to the neighborhood, the times, and to the local characters, "Mike Devlin"and "Dr. Swann".

Even when we meet bullies and abusers, Hennessy never strays into bathos or hysteria. For instance in, "How the Dog-Star Got His Name," he keeps an even tone,a matter-of-fact voice as the poem balances a mixture of pity, rage, confusion, and revenge. Here Hennessy uses every word to work out the complex truths he finds in the experience.

The poems in "Bridge and Tunnel" are energetic, accessible, wise, interesting, and original. In this collection the poems build on and interact with each other in a way that cannot be captured except by reading the whole book.

I haven't had a chance to digest this entire amazing volume of delicious poetry yet, and am literally chewing it one word at a time. MY DATE WITH SATAN is what made me want to buy this book and what a juicy little vignette it is. Women will LOVE this. FREE UNION is another poem to savor, again one that will appeal deeply to women.
This is a down to earth, EARTHY voice about life on earth - not about the etheral or spiritual in the least.

Once again, historian Don Nardo has turned out an information-filled,useful, and just plain interesting study of an aspect of ancient times. His discussion of Roman roads, aqueducts, and bridges is extremely well researched, clearly written, and his many details and anecdotes about how people used these facilities is highly entertaining. Included are discussions of tunnels through mountainsides and the difficulties of keeping them straight, the probelm of people diverting and stealing water from the aqueducts (and the penalities they received when caught), the gangs of slaves who maintained these facilities (with tomb epitaphs they left behind), the scaffolding used by Roman construction workers, and much much more. Along with Nardo's other books, this one deserves to be in every library and classroom.

A really well written account of two of the famous cosntructions of the ancient Romans- roads and aqueducts, though there's a lot more included in this thoughtful book. It also discuses bridges and their construction,as well as inns and stables along the roadways, maps and guidebooks, postal services, and much more. Written for high schhol students but very informative for anyone interested in the topic!

This is an excellent book for middle or high school students on the history of the Great Wall of China. It is very well written and organized, drawing on recent scholarly works to summarize ongoing debates about the building of the wall.

The Review posted on Amazon web site from School Library Journal doesn't do the book justice at all. The text is simply excellent (they complain of "too much imformation") and granted the photos are not in color, but they are well chosen and some are striking (such as one of the Great Wall ending literally at the sea.)

The book also includes useful boxed insets on specific topics such as the buried terra cotta army of China's first Emperor, Qin Shih Huang Ti, and the Legend of Lady Meng Jiangnu, which became the most famous of all Chinese folktales. It tells the story of a husband buried alive in the building of the wall and his wife's effort to bury him despite the obstacles imposed by this original "evil Emperor." The final chapter describes efforts to dismantle the wall (as a symbol of the past) during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's; now the Chinese government is dedicated to restoring and preserving this only human monument visible to the naked eye from space.

Every middle school and high school library should have this book, and it should be brought back into print.

Excellent.Very good for young kid

This is a great book for kids and it has wonderful illustrations. I am using it in a lesson plan for a fourth grade art appreciation class on New York architecture.

This is an extraordinary book, which would make a lovely gift for any child fascinated by bridges - or New York City. Its text is both informative and lively. And the illustrations are as fine. There are original illustrations of both the bridge and the people involved in its building, diagrams that clearly show how the bridge was built (and prevent the author from having to muddy up the text with too many technical details) and historical photos. Truly a creative approach to illustrating an inspiring book. My son, 8, has asked me to find him Elizabeth Mann's other books - she's written one about the pyramids and the Great Wall of China - right away. What a recommendation.

Building the Hoover Dam was hard, dangerous work and many people died constructing it. However, times were so tought, there was no shortage of people willing to work on it. Excellent photos and illustrations and interesting quotes from people who helped build the dam. There is a four-page fold-out diagram that shows how the dam was built. There are dam facts, a list of those who died, and an index at the end of the book. Karen Woodworth Roman, Children's Science Book Review

While the information in the book was extremely accurate, it seemed a bit long for this style of a picture book.

As an introduction to our Hoover Dam unit, I opted to focus, instead, on the absolutely stunning illustrations and allow my students to write their own words.

Later in the unit, I made the book available to my students and many found it to be a wonderful reference tool. It was quite complimentary to McBride's: Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression yet a lot more appropriate for fourth graders.

While Mann's book can be a great classroom reference for a Hoover Dam unit, it is not recommended as a read-aloud.

The Panama Canal (49 pages) by Elizabeth Mann is a well written book containing the very basic information about the canal. My disappointment is that the book was set in oversized type and every other page was an illustration. It was interesting and very easy reading. The book would be best suited for a pre-high school student.

The Panama Canal was an incredible triumph of engineering and the final move towards completion was a patently illegal action by U. S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer who had built the Suez Canal was attempting to build the canal across Panama, but the company that he headed eventually abandoned the project in disgrace. At that time, Panama was a state in Columbia and President Roosevelt tried to get the Columbians to sign a treaty ceding the rights to a canal to the United States. When he considered the conditions demanded by the Columbians to be too onerous, he supported a "rebellion" in Panama that led to independence from Columbia. A treaty was then signed and the Americans started work on the canal.
The problems that had to be overcome were substantial, and they are very well detailed in this book. The damming of the Chagres River to make the 164 square mile reservoir Gatun Lake was a stroke of genius as it created a large waterway and provided a source of water to run the locks. I was surprised to learn that there are only 12 locks in the canal. A lot of this is due to the enormous amount of earth that was moved to create the Culebra cut, a ditch 272 feet deep and wide enough for ocean-going ships to pass through. It also requires 52 million gallons of water for a ship to go through the canal.
However, the greatest single problem to be solved had nothing to do with moving earth. It was the battle against the jungle and the associated tropical diseases. All of this is explained in great detail, including the solutions to these problems. This is an excellent way for children to learn how the Panama Canal was created and I recommend it to everyone who teaches history to children.

The illustrations in this book are so good that I have offered it to my husband as a "ready made diary" of our trip to the Panama canal. The pictures capture all the beauty and the technological marvel of the canal. The book is an excellent visit in an armchair.

It's a great book, and if anyone wants to know about the New York City subway, this is the book for you. With this book, my friend and I got an A+ on the report, and artwork. It was really great!

London Bridges was ordered, paid for, but never received. So I cannot review a book that I did not received

Well, I can't say I wasn't warned: "Big Bad Wolf" exhibited all of the warning signs of a once-fascinating fiction franchise going down the toilet. I should have stopped after BBW. More importantly, James Patterson should have, too. Instead, he takes the mess that was BBW, adds a stray random villain and some other leavings from previous books, stirs in a partnership between that random villain and the Big Bad Wolf that makes no sense based on what we know of either, throws in an "Alex Cross, This Is Your Life" parade of characters, adds a dash of Al Quaeda (?!), and voila! the crap casserole that is "London Bridge." Patterson can't tie up his current plot threads and he has an annoying tendency to keep re-introducing characters (such as Christine) who once served a narrative purpose but now just add pointless drama and stretch the book another 10 pages. This book is just a mess; I was really disappointed because I'd been hoping for something to redeem BBW. Also, there apparently has never been a book in history that the Publisher's Weekly reviewers haven't loved, so posting their reviews is a waste of space.

It looks as if the scope of Patterson's Alex Cross books widened considerably when the protagonist made the switch from the Washington PD to the FBI .Cross is now no longer dealing with the national and local psycho but is a player on the global scale .Here the villains are returnees from previous novels -the Wolf (The Big Bad Wolf )and Geoffrey Shafer ,aka the Weasel (Pop Goes the Weasel).Shafer is definitely the junior partner in the alliance however and the overarching intelligence behind the terror plot to destroy London ,Tel Aviv ,Paris and New York is that of the former KCB and Red Mafia man The Wolf .The Wolf wants an enormous sum of money and the release of political prisoners are else -kapow!
The action moves between the major cities involved and the action comes thick and fast .There are false leads galore and lots of chases and shootings to keep action fans briskly turning the pages .It is never remotely plausible but most readers will willingly suspend disbelief as the thrill of the chase makes for an engrossing read.

This is a good thrilller and will be enjoyed by devotees of the genre

This book is very boring and out of focus. I was wondering if this book is written by James Patterson.

ALL of the "Alex Cross" books by James Patterson are exciting reads....I can never seem to put one of his books down! That is the only downfall to reading his books....you better have an entire day once you start one, because you will NOT be able to stop!