I have an 8 year old son who is seriously addicted to Lego building blocks and anything else that can be built. I am also a cub scout den leader and that makes me pretty good at understanding what 8 and 9 year old boys like.

They like this book! It answers some basic questions, that very subtley provide some basic engineering principles. What is BEST about this book is that every chapter has several simple projects that your child and you can do together. Again, simple, but it is suprising how educational this kind of fun can be.

My cub scouts like building bridges the best so far. You can bet we will work our way through this book and do many more projects.

Honestly, I wish a book like this existed when I was a kid. I thought engineering was all math and boring! NO SO! This book lights a fire in my imagination as well as that of my son. I love this book!

Such is our morbid fascination that this book is inevitably more attractive than one called "Why Buildings Stay Up". That said, I think I have not only learned more about structural engineering than I would have done from a positive counterpart, but I have also learned vastly more about the other factors, human and natural, that influence the ultimate success or failure of structures.

The book is based on the same material as the late 1990s TV series of the same name, and having watched that series many of the incidents and issues were familiar to me. The advantage of the book is the ability to digest information at your own speed and refer back to earlier pages, but it has to be said that the TV series communicated some of the issues better, helped by animated graphics and by the better mutual support of both pictures and narrative.

Each chapter takes a topic, whether a human factor like the law, a type of construction such as the dome, or a cause of failure such as metal fatigue, and then illustrates the issues by consideration of a number of case studies, frequently including some notable successes as well as dramatic failures. In the case of failures the book always attempts to assess both the practical cause, and also any human cause, impact and implications.

The book is very well written, in an accessible style supported by some useful appendixes on structural engineering principles. However, sometimes the simple line drawings and verbal descriptions of a structure don't manage to communicate a full understanding, and more sophisticated illustrations might have helped.

Mario Salvadori died in 1997 (at the good age of 90), and the surviving author, Matthys Levy updated the book in 2002. My feelings on the update are mixed: the chapter on terrorism, culminating with the collapse of the New York Trade Centre towers on September 11th 2001 is excellent; but why did the author not acknowledge the brilliant success of efforts to stabilise the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the late 1990s?

Overall I heartily recommend this book to anyone with a serious or lay interest in structural engineering, and the many complex human and natural issues which influence it.

An entertaining book for readers who know about structures, and an educational book for lay readers, WHY BUILDINGS FALL DOWN is an interesting collection of case studies concerning building failures. Never condescending, but never too technical, it's a fun way to learn about architecture or structural engineering.

a good book explaining the details og building and bridge failures. im wondering why the author didnt include the word 'bridge' in the title since this book covers a lot of them. illustrations are very helpful as well

I am a librarian and I love giving kids this book to use for their experiments. The experiments explain volcanoes and earthquakes in a way that is easy for them to understand. As in all experiment books, some experiment need some adult help while others require household items. The only difficulty I had with this book was the listing of the objects needed to make the experiment. They are listed awkwardly and you need to read the list carefully. (if this kink was worked out, I would have given the book 5 stars! )