The Big Dig

Rating:
Summary: KERASIOTES MUST GO
Review: Dr. Bananamore endured a traffic nightmare when he last visited Boston. And Quincy Market doesn't even have any good oddball stores anymore. Where did the pig store go? It's all just a bunch of expensive fashion retailers. Not even a Cuthbert's, Inc. Scrod Bananamore left the city entirely due to its inhospitality. Be gone, Kerasiotes. Haven't you done enough already?

Rating:
Summary: KERASIOTES MUST GO
Review: Dr. Bananamore endured a traffic nightmare when he last visited Boston. And Quincy Market doesn't even have any good oddball stores anymore. Where did the pig store go? It's all just a bunch of expensive fashion retailers. Not even a Cuthbert's, Inc. Scrod Bananamore left the city entirely due to its inhospitality. Be gone, Kerasiotes. Haven't you done enough already?

Rating:
Summary: A Nice Visualization
Review: I just finished reading this book and I was pretty impressed. I am a civil engineering student and of course am interested in projects like the Big Dig. This book is a pretty easy read: the text is big and the sentence structure is simple. However, it is a very informative book and explains the project in terms that anyone could understand. I think it would be hard to read this book without going to Boston and seeing the construction site as the pictures are somewhat hard to follow. Other than that, a good book!

Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: I just finished reading this book and I was pretty impressed. I am a civil engineering student and of course am interested in projects like the Big Dig. This book is a pretty easy read: the text is big and the sentence structure is simple. However, it is a very informative book and explains the project in terms that anyone could understand. I think it would be hard to read this book without going to Boston and seeing the construction site as the pictures are somewhat hard to follow. Other than that, a good book!

Rating:
Summary: Exposes The 90% of The Big Dig That Is Underground
Review: If you don't live in or near Boston, you may not know about The Big Dig. It is the 'largest urban construction project in the history of the modern world.' The task is like putting 'the Panama Canal . . . through New York City.' The project is 'bigger in scale than the Panama Canal or Hoover Dam.'

An elevated highway (I 93) through Boston is being replaced by an underground road and the Massachusetts Turnpike is being extended to Logan Airport through a new tunnel. The I 93 crossing of the Charles River is being replaced with a spectacular new bridge that will be the largest cable-stayed bridge in the world.

Like an iceberg, 90 percent of The Big Dig in Boston (the Central Artery/Tunnel Project) is underground. Although all of us Boston drivers have been maneuveuring around the project and admiring the cranes, we don't know much about what is going on. This book takes you to where the action has been, is now, and will be in the next five years.

I found the book to be fascinating and revealing. If you are like me, you will be glad that you finally learned what The Big Dig is all about. The local press reports have been misleading. Some examples include the rat scare (we were going to be driven out of Boston by all the rats that were unearthed), tales about the Ted Williams tunnel probably being vulnerable to being hit by a passing ship and flooding, and disasters underground related to buildings and roads being undermined. Well, so far, so good. Each press tale has turned out to have a smidgeon of truth and a gas balloon full of hyperbole.

I found the story of the difficulties involved in the project and how they were overcome to be fascinating. Advanced construction techniques from around the world are being used in the same project for the very first time. This project has all of the challenges of sending a man to the moon!

Here's my trivia list to see if you will learn anything from this book: Did you know that there is a bridge being built underground for the Red Line? What is Black Mayonnaise? How was Spectacle Island affected? Where is the Mother of all Interchanges? Where were oily razor blades found? What is an ITT? Where did soil problems most increase the cost of the project? Did you know that everyone who buys gasoline in the United States has helped pay for the project? We thank you all!

After you finish marveling over this remarkable accomplishment, I suggest that you think about what else can be improved in the world. What is absolutely a mess in your life now? How could your life be improved if the mess went away? How can you do that?

Assume the best and go after it, and you'll soon have it.

Rating:
Summary: A terrific book
Review: The Big Dig is an enormous project -- it's been going on here in Boston for over a decade -- and the more you know about it, the more impressed you become with the accomplishment. It truly will transform one of America's great cities for the next century.

This book is filled with fascinating insight into the engineering, environmental, and political challenges around the project. The writing and selection of subjects is superb: it makes highway construction mesmerizing.

But the images are not nearly as helpful as they could be. For someone not intimately familiar with "slurry walls" and "tunnel jacking", more informative images and a few diagrams would have helped me understand a lot more. Very few of the images enhance the information; most are artistic photos of "sunrise over dumptruck" which, while sometimes beautiful, really don't add that much.

And a few more maps would have helped too -- I continually had to refer back to the city overview in the first chapter to know where they were talking about, and I live in Boston.

Which leads to my final point, which is that I'm not sure how interesting this subject would be for people that are not in Boston itself. For all that the book talks about "the world's" fascination which what we are doing, I'm not sure I really believe it. For Bostonians, this is going to completely change our city, and finally remove a construction and traffic nightmare we've been living for years -- we're excited by what awaits and have all, in a way, been part of it. For other people, I suspect it's just a road project -- and how interesting is a coffee table book about that?

Rating:
Summary: A Nice Visualization
Review: This is a nice piece of documentary photography to own. One can only wish that Andy Ryan had done the photos for its much weaker companion book, The Big Dig at Night. Buy this one for sure. If the other isn't on the remainder tables by now, it will be.