Negative Positive
Title: 50% moderately useful info, 50% personal rant
Review: I enjoyed about 50% of this book. The author gives some good practical explanations of why materials, such as the hull of the Titanic, fail. As a layperson, I found this very interesting. However, I found his personal rants about the politics of scientific research and his personal tales of life in graduate school and beyond really, really tiresome. In addition, the title and book cover (a picture of a bridge failure) are a come on which have almost nothing to do with the contents. The science in the books moves from the macro to the micro, which makes a certain amount of sense but I found the topics to be really poorly organized. I would not recommend this book unless you have lots of free time.
Is the review positive or negative? 