The Day's Work

Twelve stories about work and the men and machines that do it: a bridge that must hold in flood, a ship's engines talking among themselves, a polo pony, an Indian famine, a gathering of Vermont horses. Kipling wrote them at the height of his powers, in the years he was living in America, and made competence itself the subject. "The Bridge-Builders" and ".007" are the two that engineers still read. Sixty plates of painting, from Menzel's ironworks and Eakins's rowers to Towne's birds and Daubigny's rivers, supply the visual counterpart to Kipling's labouring men.