Nearing Home by Billy Graham

In his 90s evangelist Billy Graham wrote about the challenges of aging in Nearing Home. The title is a reference to approaching death and to looking forward to being with God and loved ones who are already with Him in heaven.

That thread runs through the book, Graham’s focus is on living as an old person in this time and this world. Old age can and should be a time of purposeful living as much as any other stage of life. This is because of as much as in spite of the difficulties.

Graham did not shy away from the difficulties of aging. Our bodies lose strength. Our memories weaken. Ache, pains and illnesses beset us. More friends and family we have loved a long time pass away.

Graham encouraged his readers to prepare for aging and death some of this is practical advice for handling affairs in this world. Get your finances in order. Put documents together so your wishes will be know and followed if you are incapacitated. Wisely consider when to retire and what it will mean to leave the work world you are accustomed to for something new, though possibly even more meaningful.

Don’t let old age slip up on you. In addition to preparing for worldly concerns, it is especially important to lay a good foundation in Christ. As Graham put it, “God designs transitions and provides the grace to embrace what follows.”

Older people have important parts to play. Retirement can give you the time to be engaged in your family, church and community in a way you could not have pursued while working full time. You can encourage other because you remember many times when God has demonstrated His love, faithfulness and power in your life. You can set an example of aging with dignity and grace, even if it seems like no one is paying attention.

As I wrote this review of Nearing Home, I heard of the passing of Delores O’Riordan. In enjoyed the music of her band, The Cranberries, at the peak of their popularity about 20 years ago. I was young; I had little money and few responsibilities in those days. I should have enjoyed them more than I did. O’Riordan died at the age of 46; we were the same age. That is too young to die in my opinion.

At any age, we may be nearer to death than we know, for the Christian nearer home. Even if we are still young, or see ourselves as young, it is wise to consider that an in to this life is coming, and many years of aging may come before it. We should consider how to be ready for aging and death and how to leave a legacy, a good example, we will want to leave.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Don’t Grow Old—Grow Up! by Dorothy Carnegie

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

Graham, Billy. Nearing Home: Life, Faith, and Finishing Well. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2011.

Late Bloomers by Rich Karlgaard

The heroes of our age are young. Mark Zuckerberg, the man who made millions on Facebook while still in his 20s, is a notable example. Though Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and Tiger Woods are no longer youngsters, they achieved fame and wealth early in life and that is at least one reason why they remain famous. Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard is concerned that our focus on early achievement is depriving our society of the untapped potential of many—probably most of us—who develop at a slower rate. He discusses his concerns, and what we can do about it, in Late Bloomers.

 An industry has developed around seeking early achievement. You have to do well in school and get great SAT scores to get into elite colleges. You have to go to elite colleges to get jobs with the best companies. You have to work for the best companies to get ahead in life. If you have the right stuff, you can skip some of these steps and create your own successful business in your 20s.

 Except it’s not really so. Becoming equipped to succeed on this narrow path, which depends on early achievement, does not necessarily prepare one to have sustained success or achievement in any other area of life.

 In addition, most of us don’t have the mental equipment to make wise choices and stick to them while where young. The brain doesn’t fully mature until we’re in our mid-20s. Though the brain starts to slow down after that, certain types of intelligence—based on knowledge—continue to increase into our 40s and can be sustained well into old age. This late-developing intelligence can more than make up for the slower processing speeds of older brains.

 Kalgaard shares the stories of some late bloomers. Martha Stewart started her catering business at age 35, and published her first book at age 41. Toni Morrison published her first book, The Bluest Eye, when she was 39. More up my ally, Raymond Chandler was 51 when The Big Sleep, his first book, was published. Karlgaard pulls examples from the arts, business, sports and other fields.

 Karlgaard describes himself as a late bloomer. He didn’t do well and struggled in dead-end jobs until he was 25, when his brain finally matured enough for things to start clicking. This was when he was able to get a job that most of us would consider  ordinary, and he still had a ways to go before his career took off.

 Late bloomers have several skill, some hard-won, that help them succeed in their own time. They retain curiosity; they do not specialize to early and they do no avoid failure they way early achievers often do. The have compassion for other and themselves; they’ve had to overcome failure. They are resilient; they have developed perspective and support networks. The have learned to stay calm. The have insight gained from varied experience. The have wisdom, the elusive quality that arises from a maturing brain and a wealth of experience. The have learned when to doubt themselves and when to trust themselves. They know when to stick and when to quit. They are patient.

 As a society, we need to recognize that early achievement is not the norm. People develop at different rates and may peak in different ways at different ages. If we want to enjoy the full potential of people, we have to value the contributions of late bloomers.  We also have to open pathways for them through life-long learning and late-career pathways that force people out just because there is no more ways for them to move up the corporate ladder.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

Future Bright by Martin E. Martinez

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

Learn Better by Ulrich Boser

Mindset by Carol S. Dweck

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Quiet by Susan Cain

Self-Love by Robert H. Schuller

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

 Karlgaard, Rich. Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement. New York: Currency, 2019.

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Washington Roebling spent 14 year of his life designing and building the Brooklyn Bridge. Though originally conceived by his father, John A. Roebling, almost every aspect of the bridge conceived of and constructed from 1869 until it opened in 1883 was from the imagination and under the supervision of Washington Roebling, the chief engineer.

A lot has been written about the bridge. In Chief Engineer, Erica Wagner provides a broader picture of Roebling’s life from his youth to his productive old age.

Roebling grew up in Pennsylvania. His boyhood home was still on the frontier of settlement even in the 1830s. His formally schooling was varied, and much of his education came from assisting his father in bridge building. Though John Roebling was a successful engineer and businessman, and immigrant success story, he was abusive to his wife and children. Washington Roebling grew up to be a man who could bear hardship, but he long resented the abuse he, his siblings and especially his mother suffered in his father’s house.

Engineering was not Roebling’s only area of success. He joined Union forces during the Civil War.  Though he joined a private, his engineering experience won him an appointment and an officer and he eventually rose to the rank of colonel. His rise to the officer corps did not remove him from danger in that bloody war. Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg were just some of the battles he was part of.

The war was hard on his health, but good in other ways. It was during those years that he met his wife Emily, sister of General G. K. Warren. Emily was a vigorous, capable person who proved to be a great partner to her husband and successful on her own.

The war was not as hard on Roebling’s health as hard as the Brooklyn Bridge would be. Roebling spent a lot of time in the caissons as they sunk deeper, seeking firm foundations for the bridge towers. Prolonged work in compressed air damaged his health, possibly permanently. Though he remained in charge of the bridge, his health prevented him from being at the bridge during much of its above ground construction. Emily became his secretary and agent during this time. She was involved to such a degree that rumors spread that she was the actual engineer. There no support for the rumors that Emily was a designer of the bridge, but it is fair to say that Roebling leaned on her and her ability to organize and communicate with tact and she made important contributions to the success of the bridge.

Roebling lived a long life, surviving Emily, two of his younger brothers and even some of his nephews. Though he left an active role in the wire company his father founded, he eventually took over management of the company when his brothers who ran it, Ferdinand and Charles, and later their sons died. He seemed to relish the work and the challenge well into his eighties.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury 

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The Johnstown Flood by David McCollough

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Wagner, Erica. Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

The Caped Crusade by Glen Weldon

Based on his self-description in The Caped Crusade, Glen Weldon and I are close in age. Unlike Weldon, the limited selection of broadcast television channels in my rural community did not present 1960s Batman series. My childhood impressions of the Dark Knight came almost exclusively from the comics. My favorite version of Batman is the “World’s Greatest Detective” (when I came across his team-up with a very old Sherlock Holmes in Detective Comics 500, I had to have it). I’m also fond of the adventure hero who hues close to his pulp roots—basically the Shadow or Doc Savage in a bat suit (I also had to buy Batman 253, in which the awestruck superhero acknowledges the Shadow as an inspiration).

I suppose that I staked out my position on Batman because that is partly what Weldon’s book is about, the contradictions between Batman the character and Batman the idea, and the tension between stories loved by hardcore fans and stories appreciated by a wider audience who engage with Batman in diverse ways.

Weldon illustrates this tension, and the character’s shift as the pull is sometimes stronger in one direction or another, through the history of the character. He sees a cycle in Batman’s depiction. He starts as a dark loner. He becomes a father figure (most directly to Robin). He grows into the patriarch of a family (Robin, Alfred, Batgirl, and Huntress just to start a list). Then a desire to revitalize the character, get back to roots, or satisfy the core fandom returns him to the loner stage.

The hardcore fans Weldon writes of generally conceive Batman as serious. They want a Batman who is realistic and gritty. In my experience as a reader of comics, “serious,” “realistic” and “gritty” are often code words for prurience, grotesquery and gore. I’m not interested in that in comics or any other media.

These fans have a love-hate relationship with the Batman of other media (they just hate the Adam West version). The Tim Burton films revitalized public interest in Batman when the comics were in a serious sales slump. (The hardcore fans hate the Joel Schumacher movies. I’m with them on that.) In the Chris Nolan trilogy they finally got a Batman who is serious and has acceptance in the wider culture.

That culture is much wider now than ever, especially due to the Internet. Comics fandom was once very insular, and in some ways it still is. In the Internet age, many people are engaging the character and idea of Batman. Comic book fans, cosplayers, fan fiction writers, movie buffs, fashionistas, retro TV watchers, hipsters and a host of others are interacting with Batman’s stories, history, image and iconography. It is a world that some of the old hardcore fans may find discomfiting, but it may be a place where Batman can have lasting relevance.

Weldon plainly likes that prospect. In his view, the super-straight Adam West Batman and the grounded, brooding Chris Nolan Batman can coexist. They are both really Batman. People have always focused on the aspects of the character that resonated with them. They have also imposed on him interpretations that the writers and artists that created his stories never imagined. We do this with every text, but few texts have the longevity of Batman. That may be the Weldon’s other point. We can take any version of Batman as seriously as we want, or we can simply enjoy the stories. He is a fictional character after all.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Fic by Anne Jamison

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Wisdom from the Batcave by Cary A. Friedman

Weldon, Glen. The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

An old proverb relates trash and treasure as a matter of perspective. In Waste and Want, Susan Strasser describes American’s changing perspectives on waste from the colonial era to our own day.

In the colonial and revolutionary period of American history, manufactured objects were rare and expensive. Repair and mending were common even among the wealthy because it was difficult and costly to replace objects. In addition, the various types of home industry practiced by both men and women equipped them with skills in handling materials that made them adept at repair. Even when and object was beyond repair, it parts, or the material it was made of, might be usefully repurposed themselves or as part of an assembly. This lack of goods and facility with handling materials made bricolage common. Because things had durable value, people had a sense of stewardship relating to them.

Strasser establishes this as a beginning state. The development of industry and consumerism led to a current state in which all of these have been reversed. We have an abundance of goods, and many of them are inexpensive. We work in factories and offices where we do not develop skills for repair, and particularly have lost familiarity with materials needed for practical bricolage. These and other forces, particularly those related to health and cleanliness, have resulted in waste being something of the home where additional value may be extracted to something that is the realm of specialists that is taken away and handled by government agencies or specialized companies.

There are many stages in this development. It is interesting to me that the value of household waste as raw materials American industry provided a mechanism for poor and rural people to purchase manufactured goods. Even so, as industrialization made more goods available, along with larger quantities of more manageable waste, household waste became less valuable, and reuse and recycling became associated with poverty.

By the end of the 1920s, consumer culture was established in America, and it reinforced the trends identified by Strasser.  Planned obsolescence was developed in the automotive industry, and along with the craze for fashion, it took hold for almost all consumer goods. Even during the Great Depression, when lack of credit and unemployment made doing it yourself attractive, there was an assumption that people had access to new and old consumer goods and their packaging. Even during this period of economic distress, demand for certain types of consumer goods grew. Thrift was reimaged for a consumer age. For instance, refrigerators became commonplace, and instead of being presented as luxury items they were sold on the notion of thrift, allowing housewives to save on food by keeping leftovers and buying in bulk.

People were encouraged to conserve and recycle to support the war effort during World War II. However, this did little to reverse changing attitudes that valued the new over the old and saw little value in trash. People had jobs and money, and wartime rationing created a pent up demand for goods that was unleased after the war. Disposable goods and packaging represented cleanliness and convenience; it was freedom from dirt and drudgery. There was no value in trash, which was taken away by collectors.

There were reactions against this even in the 1950s. They grew into the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which were skeptical of corporations and consumerism. The environmental movement also grew out of this counterculture. Reuse of second-hand goods became more acceptable for even middle-class families, though few had the skills needed to rework these items to make them seem new or adapt them to current fashion. Little used goods were seen to have some value that could be recovered through yard sales. (I grew up on a stretch of highway that now boasts and annual 100 mile yard sale.)

This counterculture has not resulted in a broad return to a stewardship of things. Strasser suggests that a rising ethic of environmental or resource stewardship may lead to the mitigation of problems related to the abundant trash created by disposable and rapidly obsolete goods. There is no turning back, but we might find new reasons and ways to reduce use, reuse, and recycle.

Stasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

Why Good Things Happen to Good People by Stephen Post and Jill Neimark

Post, Stephen, and Jill Neimark. Why Good Things Happen to Good People: The Exciting New Research that Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Happier, Healthier Life. New York: Broadway Books, 2007.

Solomon wrote, “The generous soul will be made rich, and he who waters will be watered” (Proverbs 11:25 NKJV). According to bioethicist Stephen Post and writer Jill Neimark, this ancient wisdom is true and backed up by modern science.



Throughout the book, they site numerous studies of showing that giving benefits the giver with better physical and mental health and longer life. The effects can be both immediate, such as the release of feel-good chemicals in the brain when we do good, and long-term, such as longer life and better health in old age.

The book is only partly a summary of the research on the benefits of giving. It is catalog of types of giving. In each area, it provides a test to evaluate one’s giving and suggestion on how to be a giver. The authors seek to reach from the research to its application in how people can be better givers and reap the benefits of it.

An interesting aspect of the book is the areas of giving. Some are expected. Generativity, compassion and listening are types of giving that will quickly spring to the minds of many. Some may be unexpected. Courage, humor and creativity are less obvious ways of giving, but the authors show how we can enrich the lives of others through them and be better off, too.

A chapter that particularly caught my attention dealt with the way of celebration, or gratitude. I’ve long thought that our appreciation for the good in our lives is essential to our happiness. The research sited in this book confirms that gratitude makes happier and calmer. It also helps us heal and have relationships with others. The authors offer some very good advice on how to increase gratitude, just as they show ways to increase in the other forms of giving.

Fathered by God by John Eldredge

Eldredge, John. Fathered by God. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009.

Fathered by God presents again material previously published in The Way of the Wild Heart. It’s a map of the masculine journey.

Finding that I’ve writing the flowery metaphor “map of the masculine journey,” let me launch directly into a rant. Sometimes Eldredge’s writing annoys me. He writes too much in phrases when complete sentences are within his grasp. His outdoorsy examples miss me as often as they connect. For a guy into a lot of manly activity, he can come across as very touchy-feely.

In spite of this, I’ve read a half-dozen of Eldredge’s books. He talks directly about the difficulties of walking with God in a world bent on taking out those who undertake it. It’s stuff I deal with as a Christian, even if I don’t always like they way he writes about it.

The message of Fathered by God, in tough language, is, “Grow up. You need it and the people you love need it from you. Growing up is hard. You need help, especially from God.” That is where the map comes in.



The maturity of a man comes in stages, beginning in boyhood and ideally leading to sagacity in old age. In between, a man needs to be an adventurous cowboy, a dutiful warrior, a lover (of God in every case and of a woman, too, for most men), and a king of some sort of realm. These terms are mostly metaphorical. Few men are literal cowboys, but young men need challenges and hard work. Fewer will be literal kings, but every man is made to be a leader of something and hold dominion over some part of the earth.

At each stage of a man’s life, there are many opportunities for the enemy, the world or other people to take him out. This is exacerbated by the loss of the man-to-man and generation-to-generation connections that once served to help a man experience, mature, and succeed in each stage. Eldredge sees these networks of men helping men as important and encourages men to take there places in one, both to receive and give support.

Eldredge’s encouraging message is that even if a man has be damaged at some stage and hasn’t grown up the way he need to, it’s not to late to do it. The ultimate Father, God Himself, is willing and able to lead His sons into maturity. Whatever wounds a man received, God can heal. Whatever a man missed, God can supply. The masculine journey can begin or resume now.

John Eldredge also wrote
Epic
The Sacred Romance (with Brian Curtis)
Walking with God
The Way of the Wild Heart

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Into the Depths of God by Calvin Miller
No More Christian Nice Guy by Paul Coughlin

Stories for a Man’s Heart by Al and Alice Gray

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Modern life presents us with too much stuff and too much information to deal with. In The Organized Mind, psychologist Daniel J. Levitin explains how we can work with our mind, instead of against it, to handle information and make better decisions.

Attention is the critical resources for taking in information, making good decisions, and forming memories. The difficulty is that we only have so much attention to go around. Our attentional systems work to make us unconsciously ignore many of the signals that come our way; we would be overwhelmed if they did not. Our built in systems pay attention to change or to things that seem important. Our natural state is to have a wandering mind, broadly attentive to the environment, screening out the stable and safe, occasionally zooming in on something novel or critical.

We can also use the executive functions of our mind to focus attention where we want it. This can consume a lot of energy, but we can do it very effectively, sometimes focusing to the point where we lose track over everything else.

Both forms of attention have their strengths and limitations. In addition, it is costly to our attention bank to switch between modes or to switch focus from one subject to another. The load of information that we have to deal with can exhaust our attentional system, leading to inattention, poor memory, and bad decisions.

Levitin offers solutions to alleviate these problems and work with the strengths of our brains. The primary suggestion is to offload as much information as possible to the environment. The less we have to remember, and the fewer minor decisions we have to make, the better off we’ll be. Highly successful people use systems of habits, calendars, filing, labels, and standards to minimize the amount of information they have to carry in their memories. It is often not so important to know something as it is to be able to find it when you need it.

A related concept is to use categories and chunk up information. Our minds do this naturally. For instance, we typically don’t remember a telephone number as seven digits, but as two chunks of digits. We can apply a chunking strategy by breaking large jobs into doable tasks, or be grouping related tasks together. We can create scenes or stories in our mind (we do it anyway) to connect a string of events. Sleep seems to be important our natural chunking process, consolidating memories, connecting new information to old, and formulating new concepts.

Levitin presents many tools to organize information and things to make it easier on our brains. In my opinion, one of the most helpful tools is the fourfold table. This is a simple method to organize statistical information and assess the probabilities of certain outcomes. We have horrible intuition for understanding probabilities and assessing risks. Even people trained in statistics typically get probabilities wrong when they guess. The fourfold table, which Levitin describes in some detail with examples, allows one to break down the numbers and evaluate the most relevant probabilities.

The Organized Mind is not a how-to manual, though it has many strategies for organizing based on how the brain works. Levitin discusses the structure and function of parts of the brain, but is not excessively technical. A reader could skim these sections without too much loss. A reader could also focus on a particular aspect of organizing (business, time, and even social life) based on the way the book is organized, though the first few chapters have a lot of information that is background for the other sections.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

The Thinking Life by P. M. Forni

Levitin, Daniel J. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload. New York: Dutton, 2014.

STEM Books

I’ve reviewed 39 STEM-related books (and counting).  STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  As you may have seen in the news, there is a push to improve STEM education, interest students in STEM fields, and grow the number of workers in these fields.  The idea is that these will be the skills needed by workers of the future.  If you’re a STEM educator or a student considering a career in STEM fields, you might like to take a look at some of these books.

I’ll confess that I’m not an educator, but I think most of these books will be accessible to high school and college students, and a few to middle school students.  The list is also a reflection of my career and interests in engineering, public health, policy, and history.  Even with these biases, I think it is a good list for someone looking for STEM-related books.

How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection by David F. Dufty

I was fascinated by robots as a kid.  I enjoyed reading Isaac Asimov’s robot stories.  I longed for the Omnibot 2000 in the Sears Wishbook.

Robots have come a long way.  In How to Build an Android, David F. Dufty describes the short strange life of a very complex robot made to look and talk like science fiction author Philip K. Dick.  The robot had a very sophisticated and lifelike head and complex artificial intelligence.  As with most complex things, it was the work of many people who had to solve a lot of problems.

If you’re interested in robotics, this is an interesting nontechnical book.  In addition, you’ll get introduced to some freaky sci-fi.  You may even get as (somewhat) legitimate reason to use the word “Dickhead” (capitalized, it refers to a fan of PKD, so don’t go using it on anyone).

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

The Interstate highway system in the United States is one of the most enormous structures built.  Some of the prospective STEM students who read this may actually be younger than the Intestate system, though in some sense it is never complete because it needs constant repair and maintenance.  The Interstates were completed in the 1990s, but the Federal-Aid Highways go back to 1916.

Earl Swift wrote an accessible history of the Interstates in The Big Roads.  If you interested in automobiles or transportation, it’s a good read.

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Deborah Cadbury describes seven wonders of engineering in Dreams of Iron and Steel.  It covers almost a century of history, but many of the events are concentrated in the Victorian Era.  That was a time of great technological innovation.

Though the book is history, many of the structures still stand.  Railways, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Suez and Panama Canals, and Hoover Dam stand testament to an age of big engineering.

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Though the memory of Professor Wragg’s sneer prompts me to not make this confession, part of my interest in science and technology came from comic books.  Iron Man was cool.  Spider-Man’s web shooters were very cool.  Superhero comics are full of fantasy, admittedly, but the strange, unrealistic science and technology they depict have inspired many to study STEM in reality.

Physicist John Kakalios uses examples from comic books to explore real physics in The Physics of Supeheroes.  Sometimes comics get there science right.  Even when they get it wrong, it can be instructive.  If you know what people are talking about when they refer to the “New 52,” you may find this book to be a great introduction to physics.

1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics by David Acheson

Here is another confession: I’m not especially interested in math.  I endured a lot of math classes to study engineering.  Reading David Acheson’s 1089 and All That did not require such endurance.  For one reason, it is a short book.  For another, Acheson doesn’t expect his readers to be mathematicians; it is enough to follow the outline of the math he discusses.

I recommend this book because so many people have a fear of math.  1089 can be followed by many high school students and older folks with math phobias.  Just take a deep breath, relax, and follow along as well as you can.  You’ll see that math can be interesting, useful, and even beautiful in a way.

The Brooklyn Bridge: They Said it Couldn’t be Built by Judith St. George

Judith St. George’s The Brooklyn Bridge is a short history of and iconic bridge.  Written for the bridge’s 100^th anniversary, it is also the story of the engineers who sacrificed life and health to see it completed: John Roebling and his son Washington.  John Roebling was a German immigrant who built many suspension bridges and owed a wire-making business.  He gave his son and extraordinary education in bridge engineering for the time, and before beginning work on the Brooklyn Bridge he served as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Why should a cutting-edge STEM student read about a bridge that is almost 130 years old?  It’s because we still use and rely on very successful, centuries old technologies.  Improving and rebuilding our infrastructure will be an important part of our economy.  As recently as 2010, New York City and the federal government committed $500 million to repair and repaint the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

STEM lumps together science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Is there a difference between science and engineering?  Is it important?

Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history and author of The Essential Engineer, believes there is an important difference.  At heart, science is about increasing knowledge.  Engineering is about invention.  Of course, new knowledge makes new invention possible.  Just as often, though, engineering runs ahead of science.  Sometimes science didn’t advance until someone invented the instruments to conduct new observations and experiments.  The invention of the microscope made possible the science of microbiology.  Steam engines were built and greatly improved before we had a modern scientific understanding of thermodynamics.  In fact, thermodynamics was to a large extent born out of desire to understand steam engines. In this sense, it is an engineering science (study of manmade things) as much as a natural science (study of natural things) or branch of physics.

Petroski’s focus in the book is the importance of engineering to policymaking, where it is often overshadowed by science.  Policy, science, and engineering play off of each other a lot.  Most of my career as an engineer has been related to government, policy, and regulatory compliance.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Ghost Map by science writer Steven Johnson is the story of the birth of epidemiology.  Epidemiology is a medical science that uses statistics to help us understand how diseases operate in a population.  Using various statistical and geographic tools, long before we had computers and GIS, physician John Snow demonstrated that cholera, once a recurring plague that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people in some outbreaks, was a waterborne disease.  This understanding, initially met with much skepticism, allowed officials to intervene to prevent the spread of the disease.  For those who say of their math classes, “I’ll never us this,” here is a case where math (and science and policy) were used to make a great difference.

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

It is not much publicized today that the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 had a partly scientific mission.  Captains Lewis and Clark were charges with bringing back samples of the flora, fauna, and culture of the western territories.  It was also hoped that they would find a water passage to the Pacific Ocean.  In Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose writes about the scientific mission as well as the policy, diplomacy, and commercial hopes the expedition carried.

Of course, what attracts most people to the Lewis and Clark expedition is that it was a great adventure.  There is a place in STEM fields for thoughtful adventurers and explorers. 

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear by Jan Bondeson

A list like this deserves something strange, creepy, and more fun than you care to admit.  Right now, thousands of very young future STEM workers are catching bugs and snakes, breaking their toys to see what is inside, or staring into space with a weird expression of vacancy and concentration.

Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive is not a morbid book.  It is sometimes humorous, especially in consideration of topic.  From a STEM point of view, Bondeson shows how knowledge accumulates over time.  The fears and activities of our forefathers may seem strange to us, but they sometimes made sense in light of what they knew.  Buried Alive doesn’t simply play off our fascination with the grotesque and death, though the book might not have been written if we lacked that fascination, I think it reminds us to approach our ancestors with a touch of grace and humility.  Maybe our progeny will show us the same courtesy.

If you’re looking for something for a younger student, check out this post→ from Joanne Loves Science or these recommendations→ from STEM Friday.  By the way, I also write about engineering, infrastructure and the environment at Infrastructure Watch.

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