GREAT PROJECTS: The Epic Story of the Building of America, from the Taming of the Mississippi to the Invention of the Internet

"I hear America singing," wrote Walt Whitman in praise of our national identity, but surely what he heard must have been people singing while they worked to build this country. This engaging, profusely illustrated book is a companion volume to an upcoming multipart PBS documentary by Kenneth Mendal and Daniel B. Polin with the same title (set to air in February 2002), but it stands on its own merits as a well-written, entertaining historical and social record of how men and women tamed the elements and transformed the land on which they lived, mostly for the better. The book's thematic scope is ambitious and often encompasses discontinuous subject matter as it moves from the harnessing of water power on the Mississippi, Edison's discovery of electricity and how Samuel Insull democratized it for the masses in Chicago, to the construction of New York City's enormous waterworks and bridges, the evolution of Boston's ever-continuing "big dig" over several decades and the leap from material to virtual space with the Internet. Yet Tobin (winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for Ernie Pyle's War) brings it all together in a grand pattern that reveals how the seemingly impossible can move from a personal vision to a reality. While never losing sight of the larger scope of his project, Tobin has a sharp eye for salient detail and small but essential personal moments—his account of how Insull's egalitarian vision reshaped Chicago's upper-class society and its opera house is worth a book in itself, while the dramas behind Boston's fight for more accessible roads is both remarkably told and moving. While it doesn't break new historical ground, this is an excellent overview of how America got to be what it is.(Oct.)