Skywalkers: Mohawk Ironworkers Build the City: 06/10/13

Skywalkers: Mohawk Ironworkers Build the City by David Weitzman is a history of the building of the skyscrapers in eastern Canada and Manhattan. Weitzman shows how the skills used for building long houses translated into walking the beams needed for building skyscrapers and bridges.

I have mixed feelings about this book.

It is full of excellent archival photographs and quotes from presumably primary sources. It outlines a piece of history that, at least in my west coast education, is over looked in the brief discussions of the building of our modern cities, which began about 120 years ago. The book also has a lengthy bibliography that I'd like to peruse for further reading.

The text, as I mentioned, relies heavily on long quotations from other source material. These quotations are not cited on the same page, so linking up the source to the material is difficult. This lack of citation smacks of laziness and as an example to the upper elementary students reading the book, who will be at the age where they are learning how to write reports the book is also a bad example of proper citation.

Two stars

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