Macaulay. D (2000). Building big. New York: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children

The book Building Big describes how bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, domes and dams are built. It gives a history of when these different manmade inventions were made, how they were made, and what issues occurred in raising them. Macaulay also shares pictures of the formations and diagrams of how they were built. This book is organized into five sections.  One for bridges, one for tunnels, then dams, then domes and then skyscrapers.  It also includes a handy glossary of terms in the back.  In each of the sections, examples from around the world of each type of project are explored.

 The three most interesting facts that I learned this book that students will learn as well are...

• The Astrodome, a baseball field in Houston, Texas, was built from the center outwards and it used thirty-seven temporary towers.

• The Big Dig, a local tunnel creation, uses a sunken tube design.  The underwater portion of this tunnel is made of twelve prefabricated steel sections, each 40-feet-in-diameter tube roughly 300 feet long.  They were made in Baltimore, MD and towed up to Boston where all the concrete work was done inside them.

• In making the Thames tunnel of London, England beginning in 1825, a sudden rush of quicksand and water sent the workers running for their lives and into another line of business!

I highly recommend this book because...

This book tells about structures that were built centuries ago as well as local ones that have not even been completed yet.  The book caught my eye because it tells about things you do not usually learn in a science or math class.  The fact book is easy to read and is educational in that it gives somewhat of an introduction to the study of engineering sometimes when it was just starting out itself.

This book is also a book that deals with applied science and the practical applications. The specific type of book this would be considered a book of how- to- book. The book is also an informational picture book that shows different structures throughout the book on how different objects were formed and how to do different things throughout the book. I was person ally able to read this book to my two boys and they enjoyed the book the whole time I was reading it to them because they wanted to know what the next object was that the book was discussion, so I highly recommend it to young builders and students that want to engage in engineering.

 The BIG question? How do we become an engineer?