The author took 232 pages to state what could have been said in 23 pages. He uses nursery rhymes and Greek mythology to "explain" the publics expectation that some machines and structures fail!?! He would have been better served going into more details of the few cases he revisits repeatedly. As a working engineer, I found his explanations of how complex systems should be developed very off base. What happened to incremental design improvements, testing, instrumentation, quality control, and design reviews?