Don't Throw This Away! The Civil Engineering Life

If you keep your ties for so long, they start to curl up...If you think the Firth of Forth Rail Bridge is a dream vacation destination...If you evaluate infrastructure for your daughter s hamsters...If you one-up your techno-nerd neighbor by offering to network his toilets...you must meet Brian Brenner, a civil engineer s civil engineer. In Don t Throw This Away! The Civil Engineering Life, Brenner reports on what it s like to be a civil engineer in the 21st century: the mindset, the practice, the profession. Equally skilled as a writer and an engineer, Brenner ranges from serious discussions of suburban sprawl, technology run amok, and bridge aesthetics, to comical accounts of packrat habits, quacking moments, and engineering fashion. This entertaining collection of essays displays Brenner s distinctive combination of quirky humor and engineering right stuff.

Starred Review. Professor, editor and lifelong engineering enthusiast Brenner bucks staid engineering stereotypes to deliver a brief, playful look at the world through the eyes of a civil engineer, via a collection of 46 vignettes remarkable for their subtlety, humor and inspiration. Essays are short but eloquent, many packing the punch and range of any good creative non-fiction, tackling his awe, at age 4, of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; the tender question he presents his father, "What do you think of my bridge, Dad?" during two very different moments in his life; a vengeful parakeet and the "extremes of hamster behavior"; and specific sites of engineering interest, such as Nashville's Opryland Hotel, home of "some terrific public spaces" but "also emblematic of much of what is wrong with American infrastructure design today." He deals with engineering in pop culture ("Vegetarian Nerds Watching the Super Bowl"), wedding parties ("The Baby Sitter-In-Law") and the pack-rat habits of his people (in his title essays "Don't Throw This Away," I-IV). He even finds room for outright humor pieces, like "A Comparison of Dilbert and Wally," in which he considers two characters from the comic strip "Dilbert." Despite the technical pedigree, Brenner's honest, assured voice, brainiac populism and bite-sized essays make this a quirky, addictive winner that should bring out the "inner civil engineer" in a wide cross-section of readers.
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