Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape

"What's that thing?" Brian Hayes's daughter used to ask from the back seat. You might have asked the same, when seeing some strange man-made object sticking out of the ground or on the side of a building, something obviously built for function not for beauty, but whose function is obscure. Hayes wrote a book answering that question over and over, and it's one of my favorite one-of-a-kind obsessive encyclopedias, full of photographs of mud pumps, electrical insulators, and overflow inlets and—even better—explanations of how and why they work. Presenting these elements as if they were beautiful birds in a Peterson field guide, he encourages you to question where the true beauty of our landscape lies.