Customer Reviews
Wow! - By: , 22 Apr 2004 
The series was brilliant, & I really looked forward to reading the book - and, for once, I was not disappointed!
Ms. Cadbury should feel proud about her achievement. The book is very well written, & the information conveyedin such a relatively short space (only about 50 pages for each 'wonder') is rich, detailed & extremely interesting - & should prove interesting for everyone! She draws together tales from the labourers, from the supervisors, from the finaciers, & from the relatives of those involved with the, often, super-human projects to produce a truly fascinating book.
I don't normally go for historical books, but this is probably one of the best exeptions to that rule. All I can say is, "thank you mum for buying it!"
I would definately recommend this book to everyone...
"I came, I saw, I was conquered..." - By: Bruce Loveitt, 01 Oct 2003 Deborah Cadbury had a difficult task with this book. How do you take seven examples of tremendous engineering/construction feats & condense each one into 40-50 pages....and still get across to the reader the richness & complexity of each story? Well, Ms. Cadbury has managed to do it. She gives enough details so that you can understand how difficult each of these projects were. She also includes plenty of "human interest" information, so we learn about some of the engineers involvedin these projects & how their obsession with work,in several cases, affected their health & even shortened their lives. The author also talks about some of the financiers behind these projects (and some unscrupulous business practices).But Ms. Cadbury doesn't limit herself to the bigwigs. She also shows us the brawn as well as the brains - the thousands & thousands of laborers who actually did the bullwork: the people who braved 100 mile per hour winds & 100 foot waves to build the Bell Rock Lighthouse; the workers who built the Brooklyn Bridge, & got "the bends" from workingin pressurized caissons under New York's East River; the Chinese laborers who froze to deathin 40 below zero temperaturesin the Sierra Nevada mountains (or who were blown up while setting explosive charges), as the Union Pacific railroad made its way eastward from California. (The Chinese workers were considered so insignificant & dispensable that the railroad didn't even bother to keep records on how many died.) In the section on the Panama Canal,in addition to unsafe working conditions, we see another nemesis - disease - as thousands of French and, later, American workers die from Yellow Fever & Malaria, after being bitten by disease-carrying mosquitoes. (Tragically, many "educated" folks thought that only those people living a depraved life could be affected by the tropical diseases. If you were "upstanding," you were safe. So thought one of the canal company's directors - Jules Dingler. He brought the whole family over to Panama & watchedin horror as his daughter, son, wife, & his daughter's fiance were all killed by Yellow Fever.) I have read an excellent book on the building of the Panama Canal ("The Path Between The Seas" by David McCullough), which, if I recall correctly was very long...perhaps 500-600 pages. I was amazed what a good job Ms. Cadbury did of getting most of the pertinent information on this topic into such a short chapter. She is really to be commended, because doing justice to each of these stories must have been very difficult. And, again, I found a really good balancein each chapter between the technical aspects of the story & "the human touch." I'm sure that this book will cause many people to want to read more on each of these topics, & Ms. Cadbury obliges with a very nice bibliography. (From my own reading, besides recommending Mr. McCullough's book on the Panama Canal I can also suggest his very good book on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, "The Great Bridge." Regarding the Scottish lighthouses, I recently read Bella Bathurst's "The Lighthouse Stevensons," & that was excellent, as well.) By the way, for the title of this review I used part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "official dedication" speech, which he gave at the Hoover Dam on September, 30 1935. I thought the words would be appropriate for any of these great human accomplishments. Kudos to Ms. Cadbury, as well, for presenting each storyin such an intelligent & interesting manner.
