Egypt It's Pyramids, Babylon It's Hanging Gardens, Brooklyn It's Bridge

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	• The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge David McCullough, 1983 - 562 pages average customer review:based on 70 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Egypt It's Pyramids, Babylon It's Hanging Gardens, Brooklyn It's Bridge

David McCullough ranks second to none in his tireless historical research, his ability to ferret facts and details, and his skill at weaving both together in a skein with fine writing. The sheer density of the material on the printed page is impressive. That it never palls is even more so.

THE GREAT BRIDGE is McCullough's exhaustive history of the conception, creation and completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, a task that took the full intellectual capacities and the lives of two men, a father and son named Roebling, over a period of fourteen years.

The Brooklyn Bridge was born in the shadow of the Civil War and grew slowly and organically as the nation did, during the Gilded Age. McCullough's ability to evoke the era of gaslight New York, with its mansions and slums, its immigrants and its robber barons, its ideals of human progress and its shoddy realities of machine politics, is nonpareil.

Across the river is Brooklyn---sprawling, rapidly expanding Brooklyn, the third largest city in America at the time, more sedate and in its own way, more of a boomtown than New York, a city whose port handled more freight and whose lanes held more manufacturies than than the city on Manhattan Island. There were over a thousand ferry crossings per day between the two cities (even with the bridge the ferries ran until 1942), and although in retrospect it seems inevitable that the two cities should have merged (which they did by a small margin of votes in 1898, to the everlasting chagrin of some Brooklynites), while the bridge was building nobody entertained any such ideas.

McCullough, not a civil engineer, wrestles with the technical aspects of bridge building fairly well, trying with reasonable success to put the technojargon of caissons, towers, load factors, wire gauge and the like, into plain English.

THE GREAT BRIDGE is more than just a layman's manual on bridge-building, it is a social history of America at the end of the Nineteenth Century, an era when a feeling of confidence and progress motivated most Americans. Despite innumerable delays, political infighting, personality clashes, social upheaval, backlash from established quarters, charges of scandal, kickback, corruption, and fraud (at least one massive fraud is built into the fabric of the bridge, substandard steel wire rope, discovered too late to undo in full), nobody ever doubted that we could get it done. And so it was done. The bridge is now 125 years old.

McCullough waxes absolutely lyrical at times about the bridge. And in truth, it inspires poetry. The greatest suspension bridge of its era is not only a practical expression of utility, it is also a work of art. Its two supporting towers are of granite, not steel, and are formed like double gothic archways. The web of supporting cables is a form of abstract art against the sky. The Great Bridge was created at the precise moment is history when form and function were wedded to each other.

The matchmakers were the Roeblings, the father, John A. Roebling, a brilliant, severe, Germanic genius, a utopian thinker from whose mind the bridge could have sprung fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. The elder Roebling was also the first fatality the bridge claimed, at which point the work was taken up by his son, Colonel Washington A. Roebling.

Less severe than his father, Colonel Roebling was to remain the Chief Engineer for the next decade and a half, although a vile attack of the bends brought on by caisson work, and a mysterious unnamed "nervous prostration" kept him a virtual bedridden recluse for ten of those years, watching construction proceed through a telescope from his house in Brooklyn Heights.

Roebling had every minute detail of the bridge and its construction fixed in his mind, but because of his physical agony, was reduced to dictating engineering instructions to his wife, Emily, such precise instructions that the army of Assistant Engineers completed the work to specification flawlessly in his total absence. It was widely thought at the time that Colonel Roebling was deranged or rendered an idiot in the parlance of the day (neither being the case), and that his wife was in fact directing the engineering work. Regardless of the facts of Roebling's illness, the bridge could not have been completed were it not for Emily Roebling, and McCullough never wavers in his admiration for Mrs. Roebling, who was clearly a brilliant intellect and dynamic personality in her own right.

Reading THE GREAT BRIDGE places the reader in a different era, a time when all things were possible. Whether you cross the bridge every day going to and from Brooklyn and Manhattan, or whether you reside in darkest Indiana and have never seen the bridge with your own eyes, McCullough's work will not only show you what there is to see but make you view the bridge in an entirely new light.

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Great Bridge and a great read

This is a fine history and many fine biographies all rolled together with an instruction manual
for building suspension bridges. We learn of the many forces influencing the project, the technical
problems, the commercial challenges, the political corruption and the problems caused by honest
politicans, professional jealosies, the long shadow of the civil war, religious scandals, cultural
fads, rapidly changing technology, the medical mystery of the bends, and on, and on.

It is a well told tale. It is factual and well documented. The only quibble I can make is an
occasional lapse into mind reading, "...Roebling must have felt..." Even these rare occasions are
usually followed by quotes from letters, journals, or reports that make the supposition reasonable.

I have not stopped strangers on the street to urge them to read this book, but it is tempting.

I listened to it, instead of turning pages. That format works well except in one tiny detail that
might not matter to most readers. There are many comparisons between budget and actual expenses,
between physical quantities used on this bridge or that bridge, and so on. The numbers are reported
as accurately as possible. That shows good scholarship, but makes it difficult to compare magnitudes.

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Gift for a friend

I sent for this book for myself. While reading it I realized that a particular friend would really enjoy this book.
I ordered it and he had it in his house in perfect condition and very quickly.
The book is a real testament to the ingenuity and determination of men.

Another gem from America's greatest historian

Through his long line of books on some of America's greatest figures (Truman, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt) and historical events (Johnstown Flood, Panama Canal, Brooklyn Bridge), David McCollough has earned the title of America's greatest historian.

As in his previous works, McCollough masterfully crafts his prose around one of the most historically significant and interesting events of 19th century America, the design and construction of the Brookly Bridge. Prior to reading this book, I must admit to an almost complete lack of appreciation for this feat. Suffice it to say that in the mid to late 19th century, construction of a suspension bridge on the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge was almost a leap of faith during a time when many if not most bridges failed soon after construction.

This is largely a story about John A. Roebling and his son Washington Roebling, the former having initially designed and "sold" the bridge, the latter being left with the task of constructing the bridge following the gruesome death of his father from tetanus. Also a key player in the story is Washington Roebling's wife Emily, who many allege was actually in charge of the bridge project during the frequent periods of incapacity suffered by her husband.

The background on both Roeblings was very interesting and key to an understanding of the personal dynamics involved in the politics and administration of the bridge project, and some of the most enlightening segments of the work deal with the politics of the era and region (this period spanning the reign of "Boss" Tweed over Tammany Hall).

McCollough's best work, however, is taking the very complicated and cutting edge engineering principles of the time and explaining them through well crafted language and numerous sketches in such a way that most can be followed and understood (maybe not completely) by the reader. The novel concept of the caissons, by which the monstrous bridge piers were embedded into bedrock, and the resulting discovery of "the bends", was riveting reading.

All in all, a typical McCollough tour de force. As in many of his previous works, most similar in style to Panama Canal, McCollough takes a historically significant event, explains why it was so significant, points out the extreme difficulties faced by the participants and puts a human face on the travails and suffering endured by the key players. As in Panama Canal, politics plays a key role in this story.

If you're like me, most of the background to this story will be almost entirely new to you. Did you know that in 1880, Brooklyn was the third largest city in the United States (prior to its merger into New York City). I highly recommend this book, not just for its entertainment value, but for its great history lessons.

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the great bridge

Very easy to read. You feel as if you are having a personnel discussion with David McCullough.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

First published in 1972, The Great Bridge is the classic account of one of the greatest engineering feats of all time. Winning acclaim for its comprehensive look at the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, this book helped cement David McCullough's reputation as America's preeminent social historian. Now, The Great Bridge is reissued as a Simon & Schuster Classic Edition with a new introduction by the author.

This monumental book brings back for American readers the heroic vision of the America we once had. It is the enthralling story of one of the greatest events in our nation's history during the Age of Optimism -- a period when Americans were convinced in their hearts that all great things were possible. In the years around 1870, when the project was first undertaken, the concept of building a great bridge to span the East River between the great cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn required a vision and determination comparable to that which went into the building of the pyramids. Throughout the fourteen years of its construction, the odds against the successful completion of the bridge seemed staggering. Bodies were crushed and broken, lives lost, political empires fell, and surges of public emotion constantly threatened the project. But this is not merely the saga of an engineering miracle: it is a sweeping narrative of the social climate of the time and of the heroes and rascals who had a hand in either constructing or obstructing the great enterprise. Amid the flood of praise for the book when it was originally published, Newsday said succinctly "This is the definitive book on the event. Do not wait for a better try: there won't be any."

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