Mar 01 2010
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A book review of The Essential Engineer, by Henry Petroski.
“Engineers, as a professional necessity, tend to be practical people. Many, in my experience, also tend to be pessimists, ready to tell you in great detail all the technical and regulatory reasons why this or that project can’t be done or, more likely, why it can’t be done for anything less than 10 times the budget you had imagined. Then there are the others, who blend pragmatism, know-how and creativity into a particularly potent form of optimism — the kind of optimism that, as Henry Petroski points out in “The Essential Engineer,” puts his colleagues “in a position to change the world — not just study it.”
(1 note)
