Building the Empire State Building: An Interactive Engineering Adventure

by Allison Lassieur

Overview

The Roaring 20s are in high gear, and so is skyscraper fever in New York City. People are fascinated by the plans to build the Empire State Building the worlds tallest building yet. Will you: Be an eager young assistant at the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, the firm designing the Empire State Building? Join the project as a construction worker high atop the building as it rises above the city? Work as a water boy who carries water to the thirsty construction workers on the project? Experience situations taken from real life. YOU CHOOSE what you'll do next. The choices you make will either lead you and the project to success or to failure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491404003
Publisher:	Capstone Press
Publication date:	07/01/2014
Series:	You Choose: Engineering Marvels Series
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	760L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Allison Lassieur has never had pop-star dreams, but she once sang in a choir that went on a multi-state tour on the way to Walt Disney World. Today she’s an award-winning author of more than 150 history and non-fiction books about everything from Ancient Rome to the International Space Station. Her books have received several Kirkus starred reviews and Booklist recommendations, and her historical novel Journey to a Promised Land was awarded the 2020 Kansas Library Association Notable Book Award, and Library of Congress Great Reads Book selection. Allison lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, a scruffy, loveable mutt named Jingle Jack, and more books than she can count.

Table of Contents

Race to the sky — A big idea — Working in the sky — The Empire State takes shape — Tallest in the world.

Editorial Reviews

11/01/2014
Gr 5–8—These "Choose Your Own Adventure"—style books invite readers to assume roles as architects and builders of sites that set historical records in their magnitude. A bit of introductory history is followed by a stop-and-start account that asks readers to flip to different pages based on the choices they make. The fragmented nature of the series can be confusing, and despite the creative take on the topic, some of the writing is on the dry side. Readers who perservere will be presented with a grim, realistic view of the human cost of these large-scale projects (many of the options end with the death or dismissal of the worker) and some interesting sketches of history. Two "Further Paths to Explore" suggest exercises in reading and writing to aid students with key ideas and details. More ambitious than appealing, these will best serve as supplemental material for classroom units dealing with famous structures.

School Library Journal