The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

"David McCullough is a friend and mentor. His subjects range from the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania to the biographies of presidents to the Wright Brothers. The Great Bridge was, for me, a pivotal book in understanding how you could tell a story about a great engineering accomplishment in the context of the backdrop of urban history and the development of New York. He is such a masterful storyteller that he can engage you in what seemed to be an unlikely subject for a full-length nonfiction narrative and succeed in spectacular fashion. I was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island so I have some personal connections with this particular site. But what suggested it to me was that this bridge is unique as an illustration of how nature and technology can be in harmony. When you see the Brooklyn Bridge, or you walk over the bridge, you feel as if it just belongs there. It has a sense of permanence, an enduring quality, a combination of beauty and functionality that has inspired artists and filmmakers and poets. Exactly. The way he used sources—remember that this book was published in the early 1970s so he did not have access to all the sources that we have now via the Internet—he was able to use photographs and drawings and illustrations from magazines as a way of augmenting his research. It’s a very powerful story. Even though you know what the ending is—you know the bridge was built and that it’s still there—he creates a dramatic sense of just what it took to bring this bridge into being and to complete it. He also is very skillful at developing the characters, the human element, of the Roebling family: John Roebling, his son Washington Roebling, and, finally, Emily, Washington Roebling’s wife, who played a crucial role in the final years of the construction of the bridge because Washington Roebling was disabled by caisson disease. He ended up watching most of the construction of the bridge from his apartment window. His wife Emily was the key communicator between Roebling and the engineers working on the site. That was an important role and David McCullough brings that out in the book. Yes, he was one of the first causalities, if not the first. While he was serving the site, he fell and later died of tetanus."