Grady Hillhouse

Practical Engineering The best place to start if you want to understand the infrastructure you drive over every day. Grady Hillhouse worked as a dam and levee engineer before the channel, and it shows: retaining walls, culverts, water towers and failing spillways are explained with home-built tabletop models that let you watch soil give way or water find a weak path. He covers failures too, but always to explain the mechanism and the design lesson, never for the spectacle. His 2022 book, Engineering in Plain Sight, is a good companion for anyone who wants the same ideas on paper.