Author(s): Deborah Cadbury

Society & Culture

This is the story of how the modern world was forged.Here are the astonishing tales behind the Panama Canal, the SS Great Eastern, the Hoover Dam, the London Sewers, the American Railroad, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Bell Rock Lighthouse - The Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.Deborah Cadbury's fascinating book is about the people who made these world-changing machines and monuments real - people like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Joseph Bazalgette. Often obsessed beyond the point of eccentricity, those obsessions sometimes threatened to destroy them. One saved London from drowning in its own filth; others made the American West possible; one created the largest dam in history; all relied on the working men (and women and children) who gave their labour and all too often their lives on these epic projects.With extensive research and powerfully vivid writing, Deborah Cadbury has made them and their world live and breathe for us again.