This was a fascinating overview of the infrastructure that silently keeps a city running. I enjoyed learning about different systems for obtaining energy, transferring information, and controlling waste and water runoff. The book is short and easy to read, with lots of footnotes that expound on the information and put it into context. It was perfect for a reader like me who is not directly involved with the decision-making in my city, just curious about how it all works and if there are things I could do, personally, to help it run more smoothly.

I received a free Advanced Reader's Copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you, NetGalley for providing the ARC of the book.

Overall, I thought the book was interesting but it ultimately failed to be entertaining and engaging.

The good: the author clearly knows their stuff: all the technologies were explained well and made accessible to those of us with no knowledge about infrastructure.

The bad: as the tagline above states, it was just a bit boring. I liked that the author picked a city to illustrate a point but I felt like that example could have been done in a more engaging way. I also wanted to understand why and how this affects me (and others) in a profound way. In other words, how does infrastructure shapes our social world. There some indications of this but the author mostly spent time explaining how our water is cleaned.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to like this one more than I did, and although the topic of infrastructure in general was interesting, well-researched, and nicely summarized, I think I have two main quips with this book.

Mainly I think it is just wayyyyy too much content for one book. I can really appreciate that the author wanted to cover all aspects of infrastructure in one go, and they really tried to organize it in a thoughtful way. I just kept getting lost and wishing things were explained a bit more slowly or with more detail because there is just so much information to take in here.

(And I just don't like the author's voice, sorry. He sprinkles in too much autobiographical information for me, and rather than making it feel more personal it kept annoying me.)

Overall however I really liked the choice to introduce the various infrastructures by giving a specific city as an example each time, as I feel like I got to know the city a bit (as in travel writing), and the technologies discussed will make you think about how cities and society function more than you probably have thought about it before.

A really fascinating book for anyone who is interested in history and infrastructure. I learned so much reading this book and I think it's a great book for the (budding or otherwise) researcher and / or engineer in your life.