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Pushing the Limits by Henry Petroski, Knopf/Random House, $25, ISBN 1400040515 Reviewed by Jonathan Beard

BRIDGES, DAMS and tall buildings: it is fascinating to watch them go up, and when they come down, spectacular. Henry Petroski has travelled the world to examine these structures, explain why and how they were built, and in a few cases chronicle their failure. Many of these structures are in London, from Tower Bridge to the famously swaying Millennium footbridge over the Thames.

Petroski, a civil engineer who teaches at Duke University, North Carolina, turns an expert eye on the technology 鈥� and economics and vanity 鈥� behind the decisions that caused them to be built as they were. The most compelling chapters concern disasters, from the collapse of the World Trade Center to the whip-snapping death of the Tacoma Narrows bridge. The Twin Towers, he points out, had never been designed to withstand the impact of a 767 slamming into them. Every future skyscraper will take such possibilities into account.

These essays, written for The American 杏吧原创, are elegantly written and consistently thought-provoking. I only wish he had been more sceptical about China鈥檚 Three Gorges dam, which he admits has been opposed by 鈥渉uman-rights advocates, environmentalists and historians鈥�, but which he fully endorses in the name of progress.