Concrete: A Seven-Thousand-Year History - Rilegato

Palley, Reese

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1593720394 ISBN 13: 9781593720391

Casa editrice: Quantuck Lane Pr & the Mill rd, 2010

Riassunto

For seven thousand years concrete has periodically shaped the path of human progress. Reese Palley’s fascinating history of this ubiquitous and versatile material chronicles the repeated and often centuries-long losses of the technology and its many reemergences and the cultural, scientific, and engineering accomplishments it has enabled.Palley takes us from concrete’s earliest beginnings, including the startling proof that at least one of the pyramids was partially poured, through the building of the Eddystone Light, to the dramatic building explosion in the use of concrete during the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century. He discusses the environmental impact of the production of concrete and attempts to find substitutes for the burning of lime. He ends by contemplating outer space, where almost all of the elements needed to build extraterrestrial communities already exist in the chemical makeup of the moon and Mars.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

After serving in WWII, Reese Palley attended the New School for Social Research and the London School of Economics. During the Joe McCarthy era, foreign trained economists were anathema so Palley turned from academics to commerce and started a retail career in art and design eventually running nationally known galleries in New York, San Francisco, Paris, and Atlantic City for twenty-five years.

In the late seventies, by a lucky accident, Palley legally sold twenty-seven acres of boardwalk property he did not own to Bally for a casino. Palley took his windfall profits, sold his businesses, bought a sailboat, and realizing Everyman's dream, sailed his small vessel around the world taking eighteen years to do so.

During this circumnavigation he was the first private sailor into China and the Black Sea at the moment when the Communist empire was falling apart. As a result, he was able to establish numerous capitalist ventures for the Chinese, the Russians, and the Romanians. Among them a sailboat industry in China, a mushroom factory in the catacombs under Odessa, and, in Romania, an entire capitalist infrastructure that included the largest ad agency in Eastern Europe as well as a dozen supporting businesses.

During those years, because of his access to Arab ports as a small boat sailor, Palley had a short stint with the Mossad which ended abruptly when he told his wife of the connection.

In his spare time he wrote four books on sailing and three on art and is presently writing a layman's introduction to small nuclear reactors. Also during this time Palley and his wife Marilyn built a one-hundred-year historical database of the Danish cabinetmaker experience (furnitureindex.dk). Called "a national treasure" by the Danes, it is maintained by the Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen.

When asked why he chose to write a history of concrete he replied, "Because it was not there." He divides his time between Philadelphia and Key West.

Product Description:

Book by Palley Reese

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Quantuck Lane Pr & the Mill rd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1593720394
• ISBN 13: 9781593720391
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 232