Book Log 2013 #2: To Forgive Design by Henry Petroski

In this latest work, Petroski lays out various examples of how failures of various structures - bridges, buildings, parts of larger mechanisms, etc. - that are often blamed on design are actually often due to something else, a something else that never quite gets a much press as the initial blame, and thus doesn't give the full picture as to why the failure occurred.

It's an interesting topic, and right in Petroski's wheelhouse of engineering, design and failure, all topics he's tackled before. My problem with the book is that the topic is addressed with too much data. Chapters often brim with examples for a particular point, to the extent that I started to forget what point was being made. I found the book more successful when chapters dealt with a single example or topic (there's a great chapter about the replacement of the Waldo-Hancock Bridge in Maine, which I have some bias towards as both the old and new bridges are about 10 minutes from where my in-laws used to live, and I've crossed both a number of times).

So while I wouldn't label this book a failure, it is one of the harder slogs I've had with Petroski's book, and I didn't finish it. I hated to quit, but I just couldn't work through another dense, example-laden chapter whose point I'd lost due to all of the other information.