And young, and i look forward to every day. Bookshops have been posing in record numbers, National Chains are closing down. 15 years ago i knit owners of about 300 bookstores. 250 of those closed just in the past 15 years. So its important for these stores to continue to survive. They add character to the local community. Its a place, a Meeting Place for people, indicates history alive by these bookshops continuing to be in existence. For more information on booktvs recent visit to provo and the many other destinations on our cities to work, go to cspan. Org cities tour. Welcome to the bookshop on ninth street and downtown durham, North Carolina. Theyre happy to have you all here today. Thank you to cspans booktv for being here. We are delighted to have Henry Petroski who is an acclaimed historian, engineer and best selling author and also the alexander professor of Civil Engineering and professor of history at duke here tonight to discuss his new book, coming. Henry petroski has writt
Exercise. They are also personal trainers. [laughter] plus one of them is named pira pirate. [laughter] where did you come up with this idea and what was the hardest thing about writing the book my agent who was a tough minded lady told me that ive written enough about the climate and it was time to try something else. I was updating a tech book and then discovered no one has doneo this. They specialized in two things. One is sitting in the outbox and the other one is like you they get up and arrange themselves on the keyboard and the only solution is to keep the books to them and the last book i dedicated two my cat whose name was atticus otherwise known as the great keyboard. [laughter]. I have to ask you one question since you have written betweenen 40 to 50 bucks as i understand it cant tell us how you did this. How can you write that much in a lifetime . The years of undetected crime. This isnt like writing your life story or Something Like that. It all started in africa where i w
Will recall her creation of emilys list, a Political Action committee that works to elect prochoice Democratic Women to political office. We did that because we wanted to raise early money and we thought if we gave women credibility by mate raising early money, then they could go on and race that additional money they needed to win, so we were like little political venture capitalists. We were the kick starter for women and emily stance her early money is like yeast. We make the dell rise and have been doing that ever since. Afterwards airs on book tv every saturday at 10 00 p. M. And sunday at 9 00 p. M. Eastern. You can watch all previous afterward programs on her website, book tv. Org. Hello. Welcome. We are very happy to have you all here today. Thank you for cspan book tv for being here. We are delighted to have Henry Petroski, who is on the claimed historian and engineer and bestselling author and also the alexander esque professor of Civil Engineering and professor of history at
That are successful that work the way theyre intended . So its thinking a lot about failure and what could go wrong. We are seeing that with the plane that went down somewhere over malaysia. We dont know exactly where. There are so many things that couldve gone wrong with that plane and there is beginning be talk about why wasnt this anticipated or or why wasnt that anticipated. Thats good engineering of a plane is that you dont let it get lost. You have safeguards builtin and even if there are people involved that want to bring the plane down deliberately there should be features in the design of the plane that are bent that from happening. We are seeing some of that even though the plane went off course. There are ways of tracking it but not in the control of the pilot. Host that takes us to your most recent look subeleven understanding failure and when you say forgive design what you mean by that . Guest will one of the first things we often hear when there is an or a failure such a