Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

Book Description

For anyone who has ever wondered why suspension bridges don't collapse under eight lanes of traffic, how dams hold back-or give way under-thousands of gallons of water, or what principles guide the design of a skyscraper or a kangaroo, this book will ease your anxiety and answer your questions. J. E. Gordon strips engineering of its confusing technical terms, communicating its founding principles in accessible, witty prose.

Customer Reviews:

Maybe its just me, but I learned more from this book than in the U.......2006-06-15

I must confess I had a terrible time in the U making my degree in mechanical engineering.. stregth of materials almost made me mad.

But as Twain said it, I have not let my schooling interfere with my education... and this are the books that educate.. for education can only be self-education... this is what I was after in the U and I never received it!!!

I go futher with this assertion, the progress of the US (and some other advanced nations) above all the rest lies in the fact that popularizations of science and technology are readibly accesible to everyone (for all of those who want to use it, of course).. if anyone ever doubts the positive effects of globalization and the internet, I can testify that ever since I can use Amazon I can tap into the resources of knowledge previously denied by geographical barriers and help the system that produces this books.

Getting back to the book, no matter what your schooling is, if you are into design and need to know about structures you cannot go wrong with this wonderful book.

TEDIOUS READING.......2005-06-04

I'M PROBABLY THE ODD MAN OUT ON THIS ONE BUT I HAD TROUBLE WADING THROUGH THIS BOOK..IN FACT I THOUGHT THE WRITING STYLE WAS GROPING AND STUMBLING AT BEST. WRITING ABOUT STRUCTURES IN SIMLPE TERMS IS A TOUGH TASK INDEED AND I'M NOT SURE GORDON HAS SUCEEDED HERE. I FOUND THE BOOK TO BE A REAL "YAWNER".

FOR MY MONEY I WOULD BUY SALVADORI'S BOOKS OVER THIS. SALVADORI HAS A KNACK FOR MAKING THE SUBJECT TRULY GRIPPING READING. HIS BOOKS HAVE A MUCH MORE PRACTICAL BENT, AND IMHO THEY ARE WRITTEN MUCH BETTER, NOT TO MENTION THE ILLUSTRATIONS ARE TOP GRADE. TRY STRUCTURE IN ARCHITECTURE OR WHY BUILDINGS STAND UP.

THE 2 STARS ARE FOR GORDON'S DISCUSSION OF STRESS AND STRAIN, THE BEST PART OF THE BOOK FOR ME.

nice to read but lacks rigour ..........2003-10-22

The book is indeed good for the layman (I would even say very good), but it lacks rigour and this makes it less usable for professional purposes...
The author wants to avoid as much math as possible but as a consequence, some explanations contain gaps.
This book can be seen as an extra to more professional books, everybody will definitely learn something from it and it reads very well...But if you want to have a rigorous understanding of structures, you should buy another book ...

Eccentric.......2002-05-25

At times I was annoyed by Mr Gordon's style - this is the work of a real old-world engineer. The little anecdotes he scatters through the work where so-and-so told him something, or it was rumoured that professor somebody said this, or 'I have heard it claimed that.....' annoyed me with their hearsay quality and lack of verifiability.

But then there are some very interesting discussions that do make the book an interesting introduction to engineering and the structure of things. I just would have preferred if it read less like an engineer had written it!

Very interesting book.......2002-02-10

I bought this book translated into Spanish. (Ediciones Celeste)ISBN 84-8211-190-6.
I'm Civil (Structural) and Industrial engineer. I found this book with a different vision of our profession. Gordon wants to answer why the things are stable.

Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down

Average customer rating:

Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down
J.E. Gordon
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OS7T0C

Average customer rating:

Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down
J. E. Gordon
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OIYVN0

Average customer rating:

Structures, or Why things don't fall down
J. E. Gordon
Manufacturer: Plenum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OLTI2Q

Average customer rating:

Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down
J. E. Gordon
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K6FFCW

Average customer rating:

Structures: Or, Why Things Don't Fall Down
J. E. Gordon
Manufacturer: Da Capo
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OSX6P4

Average customer rating:

Structures: Or, Why Things Don't Fall Down

Manufacturer: Penguin Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000GQDXMA

Structures: Or, Why Things Don't Fall Down (Da Capo Paperback)

Average customer rating:

Structures: Or, Why Things Don't Fall Down (Da Capo Paperback)
J. E. Gordon
Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OSJRKM

Amazon.com

Frans Lanting, a Dutch American photographer, delivers yet another extraordinary book drawn from time spent alongside African waterholes, Antarctic beaches, and North Pacific islands, among other locales. Lanting chronicles the lives of residents such as the aye-aye of Madagascar, the elephant seal of California, and the caiman of Brazil. He favors an up-close and personal approach to his work, and his aptly titled Eye to Eye, made up of 140 color plates, captures the essential qualities of various animals. The subjects did not always appreciate posing for him; while making his images Lanting was challenged by African elephants, sniffed at by lions, and shunned by macaws.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent photography book.......2006-11-03

Wonderful - the shots were amazing. I really enjoyed just leafing through the book and let the visions just wash over me.

A lesson about dignity ..........2005-12-14

From the elephant up to the insect, from the cayman up to the seal every animal looks us in the eyes deeply. "Less than the human being: - the monkey follows in the system of zoology according to an immense ravine. If one, however, once wanted to organize the animals after her bliss, cosiness etc., then some people would come to stand anyway apparently under the miller donkeys and hounds ... ", 250 years ago the nature scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg already wrote. However, he did not have a camera yet to hand to cover this. Frans Lanting, however, shows us the determination with which snow geese and ibisses, penguins or zebras are away to something, shows us her family care and the dignity of animals in liberty - at times, when more and more people feel caught - a book which reminds us that "upright walking"- that synonymous of the philosophers for courage and self-respect - that you can make it true even on all four paws...

Face Time.......2005-01-28

Frans Lanting is one of the great wildlife photographers of the world. He has published many books showing wild animals but "Eye to Eye" is certainly one of his most famous. It consists of dramatically close-up photographs of animals, always concentrating on the eyes of the subject.

The book is divided into three parts: "One on One" shows photographs of single animals, often so close that the frame is filled completely with just the animal's eyes. "Two by Two" usually shows pairs of animals, although there are occasional shots of larger groups. Often the pictures are of mother and child, or mates, but a few shots show conflict. "All in All" shows shots of larger groups of animals. The book also contains a two page section called "Behind the Camera" in which Lanting discusses his photographic philosophy but provides few hints that will allow others to copy his style. Finally, perhaps because the text of the main sessions is limited to species name, there is a section of thumbnails with a brief statement concerning the picture. I found this section to be particularly inadequate since I often said to myself "How did he do that?" but got no help in finding an answer.

These are amazing pictures, primarily because Lanting has managed to get so close to his subjects. In a few pictures we can see that that is a result of enlarging and cropping, but in most cases the pictures are sharp enough so that so that we realize he was really close to the animals. Moreover, with a few exceptions, these are not captive animals. I for one would not like to take a picture of a wild lion at a distance of twenty feet. At least one critic has suggested that this book raised the bar for all wildlife photographers, forcing them to get closer to their subjects, and placing more stress upon photographers and subject.

There are moments of great intimacy, particularly in the "Two by Two" section, where the pictures of parent and child tug at our heartstrings. It's hard not to see human characteristics in these photos. The book also benefits from its layout, grouping its subjects by actions. Thus there are pictures of a huge flock of butterflies followed by pictures of ibises, penguins, snow geese, zebras and elephants all purposefully on the move to some destination. I also particularly enjoyed facing pictures of a lion and a leopard, moving toward the centerfold in mirror image.

These are great photographs because the photographer got so close to his subjects. But they are also mostly documentary. Few of the pictures rise to the level where the form rather than the subject makes them art, although I was particularly struck by a picture of Oryxes carefully treading their way across the Namibian sand dunes. But when I compare Lanting's photographs to the work of other wildlife photographers like Art Wolfe, I can see the difference. The pictures in Wolfe's "The Living Wild" show each animal in its environment, where Wolfe was better able to concentrate on the composition of his subjects to create a more artful picture.

Not withstanding this quibble, "Eye to Eye" is a great book, and readers are unlikely to soon forget these close encounters with the other living inhabitants of our planet.

Another masterpiece.......2003-05-28

Frans Lanting does it again in Eye To Eye--a brilliant collection of intimate portraits and daily activities of various animals. Like Jungles, it's a book that no natural photographer should be without. When you can see the individual hairs in a courgar's fur coat, it makes you kind of wonder what it would be like to be that close to one.
Looking at Lanting's work is always like looking through a book of artwork, as if he is the Picasso of photography and we are looking through his masterpieces.

Prepare To Be Amazed !.......2002-09-06

Wow !!! How can anyone get so close?!

These photographs are stunning. The talent of Frans Lanting oozes from these pages.

There is a closeness to the subjects here that borders on the intimate. In some cases, one wonders how he actually managed to get the shot.

The focussing and exposure is spot on and the composition is perfect.

I have tried to follow this type of photography and I am only too aware of how difficult it is to obtain these sorts of images.

I take my hat off to Frans Lanting. This is a brilliant work. A completely unique approach to wildlife photography. His behind the scenes narrative to the shots is illuminating.

This book is a valuable reference for all nature photographers. Sensational !

Book Description

Buddhist images are ubiquitous in Japan, yet they are rarely accorded much attention in studies of Buddhist monastic traditions. Scholars of religion tend to regard Buddhist images as mere symbols or representations of religious ideals, commemorations of saints and patriarchs, ancillary aids to meditative practice, or the focus of lay piety. Art historians approach these images as works of art suitable for stylistic and iconographic analysis. Yet neither of these groups of scholars has adequately appreciated the centrality and significance of images and image worship in Japanese monastic practice.

The essays in this volume focus on the historical, institutional, and ritual context of a number of Japanese Buddhist paintings, sculptures, calligraphies, and relics—some celebrated, others long overlooked. Robert H. Sharf’s introduction examines the reasons for the marginalization of images by modern Buddhist apologists and Western scholars alike, tackling the thorny question of whether Buddhists were in fact idolators.

The essays by Paul Groner and Karen Brock document and explicate the crucial role that sacred images played in the lives of two eminent medieval clerics, Eison and Myoe. James Dobbins looks at Shin representations of Shinran, founder of the Shin school of Pure Land Buddhism, and finds that early Shin piety was centered as much on Shinran and his images as on the Buddha Amida himself. Robert H. Sharf’s essay on the use of Tantric mandalas reveals that, contrary to received opinion, such mandalas were not used as aids to ritual visualization but rather as vivified entities whose presence ensured the efficacy of the rite.

In each case, the authors find that the images were treated, by elite monks and unlettered laypersons alike, as living presences with considerable apotropaic and salvific power, and that Japanese Buddhist monastic life was centered around the management and veneration of these numinous beings.

Customer Reviews:

A Real Eye-Opening Read!.......2006-04-20

I've been waiting a long time for a book like this. Back when I lived in Japan I regularly visited temples, and was especially fascinated with the many statues and paintings of Buddhist deities there. And while many of them had incredible artistic value purely from an aesthetic angle, it was also clear that these weren't merely art objects but something a lot more. What exactly was hard to determine. Any books I found in English or Japanese only discussed them from the art historical angle. "Living Images" here is different. It discusses their real religious significance; their role in ritual, their function in religious practice, how they were conceived of, what they are doing there besides providing interior decor.

In the introduction, Robert Sharf discusses the reasons why art historians overlook the religious dimension of these Buddhist icons and why Buddhologists and scholars of Japanese Religion tend to ignore them entirely. Then he takes on the aggressive Christian missionary rhetoric of "idolatry" and outlines some of the Buddhist doctrinal formulations relevant to Buddhist iconography. After this of course come the four essays of which the book chiefly consists. "Portraits of Shinran in Medieval Pure Land Buddhism" by James Dobbins, "'My Reflection Should Be Your Keepsake': Myoe's Vision of the Kasuga Deity" by Karen Brock, "Icons and Relics in Eison's Religious Activities" by Paul Groner--which focuses especially on icons of Shakamuni, Aizen Myoo, and Monju Bosatsu at Saidaiji Temple, and "Visualization and Mandala in Shingon Buddhism" by Robert Sharf again. These articles are all uniformly well-written and scholarly.

And it IS a book about icons after all, so thank goodness it is profusely illustrated with eight color plates and 47 black & white pictures.

Book Description

Why spend upwards of $10,000 a year on therapy when you can get the same results in the comfort of your own home?

Cancel your evening session: Steven Appleby, Britain's Bard of Graphic Comedy has come up with a cure for Western civilization and its manifold discontents, including yours. Compulsively late? Concerned about recurring fantasies of killing your partner? Or just anxious to have your ego stroked? This slim little volume will help you get in touch with your feelings in a snap, not to mention plugging that nasty hole that therapy is burning in your pocket.

Amazon.com

In an amazing feat of puzzle-working, Edward A. Martin has reconstructed the love affair between Marion Bloom, a struggling Washington writer, and H. L. Mencken, the respected journalist. The affair transpired before Mencken's marriage to Sara Haardt and, as we learn, contained the tumult and intensity that that latter relationship didn't. Though Mencken burned the letters Bloom sent to him, Bloom kept the ones from Mencken. Martin uses those remaining letters plus Bloom's letters to her sister and various writings of Mencken to piece together the tale, which knocks some of the polish off Mencken's image.

Customer Reviews:

I really liked this book!.......2007-08-30

A very moving book. That every adult man or woman should read about the relationship between adult child and their parent/s

An important book to read.......2000-05-09

After his father was diagnosed with cancer, Blake Morrison & his family watch him quickly deteriorate & die within a matter of weeks. In trying to come to terms with his death, the author takes you back to the times he spent with his father through childhood to adolescence & adulthood. He writes an honest account of his feelings towards his father both good & bad, alternating between memories of the past & the current trauma of watching him fade away.

His experience is not unique which makes this a very important book to read.

The love hate relationship of a son with his father........1998-08-01

I very English book, a small social commentary on the parts of Britain and a class of British life that the foreign visitor rarely sees. Until recently, all through Britain the local Doctor ( or G.P. as he would also be known) was looked up to as being something else, something better and yet had contact to all classes. In the days up until the 1960's, he was perhaps the only person in a village other than the local Church of England clergyman that had been to a University; as a result the Doctor's son was considered something unusual. In my English schooldays in the 1950's, the sons of Doctors were certainly regarded so. Blake Morrison has written a book of childhood to adulthood memories of his father. The fact that the book is based on the few weeks between his father being diagnosed to be suffering terminal cancer to his death, it is in many ways not a light subject, but everywhere there is a glimmer of humour. For anyone like me, who has lost one or both parents i! t underlines that feeling you have that you have from time to time , in good and bad times , that you would like to be able to have a short chat with the old man... but now it's too late.

Average customer rating:

AND WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER?
MORRISON
Manufacturer: GRANTA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000S6M2WA

Average customer rating:

And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Blake Morrison
Manufacturer: Penguin Books / Granta
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Average customer rating:

And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Blake Morrison
Manufacturer: Penguin Books / Granta
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

In the Freud Archives (New York Review Books Classics)

ASIN: 0140140743

And When Did You Last See Your Father? The Victorian Painter and British History

Average customer rating:

And When Did You Last See Your Father? The Victorian Painter and British History
Roy Strong
Manufacturer: Thames & Hudson Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0500271321
Release Date: 1978-07-20

Average customer rating:

And When Did You Last See Your Father?: The Victorian Painter and British History
Roy C. Strong
Manufacturer: Thames and Hudson
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JK3AGC

And When Did You Last See Your Father?: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 13 November 1992-10 January 1993

Average customer rating:

And When Did You Last See Your Father?: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 13 November 1992-10 January 1993
Edward Morris
Manufacturer: National Museums & Galleries
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Painting | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0906367581

Average customer rating:

When Did You Last See Your Father?
Jeremy Hardy
Manufacturer: Arrow (A Division of Random House Group)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

General | Parenting | Parenting & Families | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0749313552

When did you last see your father?: A Son's Memoir of Love and Loss

Average customer rating:

When did you last see your father?: A Son's Memoir of Love and Loss
Blake Morrison
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Sociologists | Professionals & Academics | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Memoirs | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Fatherhood | Family Relationships | Parenting & Families | Subjects | Books

General | Parenting & Families | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0312427093
Release Date: 2008-04-01

Book Description

Soon to be a major motion picture, directed by Anand Tucker and starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent

And when did you last see your father? Was it last weekend or last Christmas? Was it before or after he exhaled his last breath? And was it him really, or was it a version of him, shaped by your own expectations and disappointments?

Blake Morrison's subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we come to ask ourselves the same searching questions that Blake Morrison poses: Can we ever see our parents as themselves, or are they forever defined through a child's eyes? What are the secrets of their lives, and why do they spare us that knowledge? And when they die, what do they take with them that cannot be recovered or inherited?

When Did You Last See Your Father?: The Scandalous History of Fatherhood

Average customer rating:

When Did You Last See Your Father?: The Scandalous History of Fatherhood
Jeremy Hardy
Manufacturer: Methuen Publishing Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books