Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Biomedical engineer Madhavan (Practicing Sustainability) sets out to "reverse-engineer the engineering mind-set" to show lay readers the versatility of engineering techniques in everyday life. He considers different engineers or individuals who have solved engineering problems as exemplars of aspects of this mind-set, such as modular systems thinking or working on functional prototyping. His wide-ranging examples include Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval's redesign of French cannons and Alfred Hitchcock's approach to filmmaking, and demonstrate that engineering methods can be applied to every walk of life. While Madhavan does use some jargon, his problem-solving vignettes are accessible to non-engineers, particularly as he uses examples of familiar problems or inventions such as traffic congestion, sewage treatment, or the coordination of GPS and 911 services. Madhavan's work will help readers move from the common understanding of engineering as a set of technical skills for building objects to the realization that engineering is a way of looking at and solving problems, and is not limited to situations involving science and math. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This latest book by Madhavan (editor, Practicing Sustainability), biomedical engineer at the National Academy of Sciences, can proudly takes its place alongside other esteemed works on engineering such as Samuel C. Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering and Henry Petroski's Pushing the Limits. Written in a clear, conversational style that doesn't compromise the explanations of how engineers solve problems, it is enhanced by stories of innovators that illustrate principles such as standardization, optimization, and prototyping. Many of the accounts relate inventions now taken for granted, including the self-service grocery store with organized aisles and front checkout stations pioneered by Clarence Saunders at his Piggly Wiggly stores and Margaret Hutchinson's process borrowed from breweries that allowed Pfizer to first mass produce penicillin. A theme throughout is the systems-thinking approach successful engineers take in using their minds as "inference engines." Madhavan also reveals much about his life and career in telling the story of generations of engineers working to clean up India's Ganges river. VERDICT A delightful book that will appeal to readers interested in human innovations. Expect to be convinced by the author's thesis that an engineering mind set can be helpful to anyone.-Sara R. Tompson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Lib., Archives & Records Section, Pasadena, CA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Want to be an engineer? Then learn to think like one, especially by learning how to see structure where chaos abounds. Engineers aren't like ordinary mortals. Ideally, they're Spock-like creatures who think logically about all things. That's one reason, writes engineer/economist/National Academy of Sciences adviser Madhavan in an interesting aside, engineers aren't often found in politics, in which participants in the melee "show no reluctance to make bold pronouncements beyond their areas of competence." Engineers, conversely, dislike making mistakes and oversimplifying, and in theory, their line of reasoning steers clear of value judgments of the sort politics is built on. Not that the engineering mind yields utopias: as Madhavan sagely notes, optimization algorithms may yield financial windfalls, but they also "had an invisible hand' in financial disasters," just as the liberating technology of cellphones now means that people are chained to their work at all hours. So how do engineers think? With quantitative rigor, of course, and with qualitative objectivity. Madhavan's opening case studies, which "demonstrate the power of engineers to convert feelings into finished products," take their time in cohering, but eventually they settle down to look at the issues of structure, constraint, and trade-off, as well as the allied concepts of "recombination, optimization, efficiency, and prototyping." One need not be employed as an engineer in order to put these principles to use; as Madhavan notes in one of the best case studies in the book, the film director Alfred Hitchcock was trained as an engineer and employed these practices in his movies: "Hitchcock was a backward thinker. His final product was preordained but flexible. He valued implementation over improvisation." Madhavan is a less engaging writer than Henry Petroski, who covers much the same ground, but he provides a readable survey for would-be engineers and those seeking to understand them. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
