The Great Miscalculation

Brings the full, gripping story of the Citicorp Center to life with a compelling blend of technical insight and drama. Greenburg's writing powerfully conveys the courage and humility required to right a wrong. ~Grady Hillhouse, author of Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment

This book must be read cover to cover, as it is more than the sum of its parts. The six regulatory projects at its core are arranged biographically, as if one life extending from gametes to execution. The result is a provocative analysis of the ways the U.S. state claims social substance through regulatory scenarios selectively staged on the bodies of individuals. In the aggregate, the asymmetrical contests over those stagings compel a rethinking of liberal assumptions regarding citizenship as promising either legal and political agency or full membership in a national community. ~Carol J. Greenhouse, Arthur W. Marks’ 19 Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Princeton University

Reading Michael Greenburg’s chronicle of an iconic skyscraper’s rise and near-fall was an unusual and exhilarating experience. Unusual because of a sense of déjà vu. I was no stranger to the story, having been the first—as Mr. Greenburg notes—to bring it to national attention, in a magazine article three decades ago. And exhilarating because this masterly account reveals the full scope of a sequence of events that could have ended in catastrophe. It’s a work of scholarship that gives the story its ultimate form, a soaring drama built on a foundation of scrupulously reported facts, and that solves an intriguing mystery in the process. ~Joe Morgenstern