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  • Good Guys, Wiseguys, and Putting Up Buildings: A Life in Construction by Samuel C. Florman
  • Henry Petroski (bio)
Good Guys, Wiseguys, and Putting Up Buildings: A Life in Construction. By Samuel C. Florman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2012. Pp. v+342. $25.95.

In this engaging and candid memoir, Samuel Florman recalls his six-decades-long career in the building construction industry in New York City and its environs, providing revealing glimpses into the nature of the business. He traces his engagement in and fascination with construction from his World War II days, when as an engineering student at Dartmouth College he joined the navy. As soon as he earned his degree he was deployed with the newly created Seabees to the Philippines. Postwar, his first civilian jobs exposed him to the tedium, excitement, rewards, and risks associated with, among other things, estimating costs, bidding jobs, and doing business generally. For the bulk of the book, he is engaged in his long-term partnership with Kreisler Borg Florman (KBF), whose small office was located in Westchester County, just north of New York City. [End Page 422]

Although itself strictly speaking not a work of history, Florman's book is full of raw data that should be of interest to the historian of the building industry. There are descriptions of how small construction businesses operated; anecdotes relating to good, bad, honest, and corrupt practices; insights into the relationship between the private and public sectors; and character sketches of people engaged in it all. Much of what Florman has recorded in his memoir also may provide some deep background and context to recent events on the New York construction scene that led to criminal trials stemming from accusations of fraud perpetrated by concrete testing laboratories and deaths caused by construction crane accidents that were allegedly due to improper rigging and to corrupt inspection and operator certification practices.

Florman relates how, even amid the seemingly chaotic and corrupt construction industry, a small firm like his could survive and prosper with integrity and dignity. He reveals how he and his partner Robert Borg (even after Jack Kreisler was bought out by the two other partners his name was retained in the firm's title) made a deliberate decision to seek only about four new building contracts each year. Since the average duration of a contract was two years, KBF had only about eight active projects going at any given time. As Florman explains, this enabled the two principals to be personally involved with every project, which they used as a selling point to obtain future business. He believes that this practice kept them from contracting "the diseases of overexpansion and loss of control, diseases that have led to the failure of many construction firms" (p. 75).

Keeping their construction business a manageable size enabled Borg and Florman to spend more time with their families and to engage in extracurricular activities. Among other things, Borg founded the American Society of Civil Engineers' Committee on Social and Environmental Concerns in Construction. Florman became engaged in civic and professional affairs—and took up writing as an avocation. His 1968 book, Engineering and the Liberal Arts: A Technologist's Guide to History, Literature, Philosophy, Art, and Music, which contains a chapter on the history of technology, was followed eight years later by The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, which brought Florman broad recognition as an articulate and eloquent apologist for the profession, including enthusiastic reviews in Time, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. (In the interests of full disclosure, this reviewer acknowledges that The Existential Pleasures of Engineering played no small role in developing his aspirations to write for a broad audience books about engineering.)

Florman has also written magazine columns for Harper's and Technology Review, some of which were collected or adapted in his Blaming Technology (1981), The Civilized Engineer (1987), and The Introspective Engineer (1996). These books, together with The Existential Pleasures, he considered "a loosely connected series" (Introspective Engineer, p. xii) on engineering and [End Page 423] technology and their relationship to society. He departed from the essay form in his 2001 The Aftermath: A Novel of...

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