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Building the Golden Gate Bridge: An Interactive Engineering Adventure

Series: You Choose Books:  Engineering Marvels
Written by Blake Hoena
Capstone Young Readers 2015
978-1-4914-0403-4
112 pages            Age 8—12
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‘People living in San Francisco during the 1920s and 1930s are fascinated by the project to build the Golden Gate Bridge—the world’s longest suspension bridge yet. Will you [1] Be a designer of the bridge, working to solve the many challenges created by such an enormous project [or 2]Work as a crew member, accepting the dangers of laboring hundreds of feet in the air above the cold, swirling currents pf the San Francisco Bay? Everything in this book happened to real people. And YOU CHOOSE what to do next. The choices you make either lead you and the project to success—or to failure.” [back cover]

Review
I really like these interactive books that let you decide what happens in the story. Every possibility is true and happened to someone during the planning and building of the Golden Gate Bridge. You can be engineer, John Strauss, who designs the bridge and must decide which of three design choices available in 1919 will work best: a cantilever bridge, a suspension bridge, or a cantilever-suspension  hybrid bridge made up of parts of the former two types (pictures and description of each included); or a construction laborer (a catcher or a skywalker).

I began with the engineer route . . . and failed. I fared better as a laborer, first as a catcher. I catch hot rivets (heated to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit), flung to me from above, which I catch in a funnel shaped cup and hand, using tongs, to the next guy, who uses it to connect two beams. Missing even one red-hot rivet can be catastrophic. Someone could get hurt, especially someone—or thing—in the water below. Objects also tend to fall from men working higher up, mainly due to wind gusts knocking tin cups out of hands and safety helmets off heads. Looking up to see what is falling your way can get you badly hurt, if not killed. I looked up, ending my short career. Safety measures, the few used, are an interesting part of the story.

Finally, I tried my hand at the last job option: a skywalker spinning cables. Standing 756 feet up at the top of the bridge, men—sorry, no women—skywalkers wait for three wheels, carrying coils of wire, to race down a guide rope. Once the wheels pass, they grab the strands of wire, gather, tighten, and keep them from twisting around one another. The supporting cables on the Golden Gate Bridge are made of hundreds of thousands of wires. The job is dangerous thanks to the heavy fog that occurs so often in the Bay area. A cowbell hung from each wheel so the wheels could be heard when the fog was thick.

What is cool about the You Choose Books is the amount of history readers will learn, often without realizing they are learning. Based on true stories from the building the Golden Gate Bridge, what you will face on each path actually happened to someone. While trying to make decisions to build the bridge, stay employed, and alive, history becomes part of your story. You need to understand some part of the Golden Gate Bridge’s beginning—its history—to make your choices.

I never could get excited about something that happened years before I was born—or even yesterday’s news. I knew nothing about building the Golden Gate Bridge it was just always there. Now, I know part of the history and so will kids who read these interesting stories. For this reason, the You Choose Books series are perfect as adjunct texts for teachers. And perfect for boys, who will love the action and the ability to wipe themselves off and try another path. Girls will, too, but if there is a book made for the minds of boys, the You Choose Books are those books.

© bernard-gagnon-own-work-gfdl

The Building of the Golden Gate Bridge has 2 story paths (engineer or laborer), 33 choices, and 9 possible story endings, as do all of the You Choose Books. There is also a Timeline beginning in 1872 when Charles Crooker proposed building a bridge over Golden Gate (and 61 before actual construction on the bridge began). After reading and rereading each path and its nine different endings, it is all but impossible not to know something about the history of The Building of the Golden Gate Bridge.

BUILDING THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE: AN INTERACTIVE ENGINEERING ADVENTURE (YOU CHOOSE BOOKS: ENGINEERING MARVELS). Text copyright © 2015 by Blake Hoena. Images copyright from various sources, as noted. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Capstone Children’s Books, North Mankato, MN.

Purchase Building the Golden Gate Bridge at Amazon—Book Depository— CapstonePub.

Learn more about Building the Golden Gate Bridge HERE.
Meet the author, Blake Hoena, at his website:  http://bahoena.com/
Find more picture books at the Capstone Young Readers website:  http://www.capstonepub.com/
.    .     .    .Capstone Young Readers is an imprint of Capstone

YOU CHOOSE BOOKS: ENGINEERING MARVELS

Building the Empire State Building by Allison Lassieur

Building the Great Wall of China by Allison Lassieur

Building the Transcontinental Railroad by Steven Otfinoski

Review Section: word count = 614

Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews. All Rights Reserved

For the past several years, I’ve presented at the Young Authors, Young Artists Conference in Rochester, MN. The event, sponsored by the Southeast Service Cooperative, is a gathering of 800 talented, energetic, and artistic fourth through sixth graders from schools in southeastern Minnesota. My presentation, “Creating Graphic Novels,” discusses the steps involved in creating graphic stories.

Initially, when the event was called the Southeast Young Writers Conference, my presentation was about poetry. After I wrote my first graphic novel, Matthew Henson: Arctic Explorer, on the cusp of the recent graphic novel boom, I switched to my current presentation. After all, these students are the same age as I was when I first delved into comics. I brought in samples of each step involved in the creation of a graphic novel, from my outline and script to the storyboards, inks, and final colors, and discussed the reasons and importance of each of these steps. And I always ended the presentation with an activity where we’d create and share
a one-page comic. At first, few students really understood what a graphic novel was, and usually only a handful hands would raise when asked if they read graphic novels, but the final activity was always a hit.

A lot has changed, visually, over the years. I now show art from my Eek and Ack books. The name of the conference has evolved to include “Young Artists”, and there are nearly as many art sessions as there are writing ones. In each of my eight presentations, nearly all the students raised theirs hands when asked if they read graphic novels. Young readers get the idea of telling a story through pictures, and understand the concept of sequential art. And they can’t get enough. They’re also excited to create their own comic stories and learn the art of storytelling through illustrations. During my most recent presentations, I was continually asked, “Is it time to draw yet?” “Can we start drawing now?”

It thrills me, as an author of graphic novels, knowing that they are not only getting kids more excited about reading, but they are also animating their creative talents. Graphic novels can cultivate reading skills as well as energize artistic ones.

--Blake A. Hoena
Production Manager, Stone Arch Books
and author of the Eek and Ack series

Name: Blake Hoena

Occupation/role at Stone Arch:
Production Manager — basically, I help coordinate the process of creating books from contracting authors and illustrators to receiving bound books from the printer vendors, and schedule all the many steps in between.

Years at Stone Arch:
Nearly three years, but I was at Capstone Press for seven years before joining the staff at Stone Arch.

Education:
Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin (I’m the staff cheese head), and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Minnesota State University, Mankato.

What's your favorite SAB book?
Right now (since it’s always the new books that get me stoked) my favorites are our Zinc Alloy books: Superzero and Revealed (coming out in August). They have some cool, retro-looking art and the quirky humor pokes some jabs at the whole superhero thing.

What was your favorite book when you were a kid?
In fifth grade, the RIF truck stopped by Emerson Elementary in Stevens Point, WI (my hometown), and I picked out The Hobbit, mostly because of the bright orange cover. Seriously! I had read a lot before that, but The Hobbit was my first “real” novel and the first fantasy story I had read. Reading about elves and dwarfs and dragons was the magic that sparked my interest in writing.

What were you like as an elementary/middle-school student?
I was a nerd then just like I am now, and as it was in school, my life is still all about books (I even own boxes of comics), writing, and computers. I’ve been lucky that my adolescent interests have turned into a career.

What's your favorite thing to do in your free time? Outside of reading and writing, which would be the obvious choices, it’s disc golf. I’m not really that good, but with the weather thawing here in MN, I’m gearing up to get out there and toss a few Frisbees into the woods.

Tell us a memorable Stone Arch Books moment from the past year.
Okay, this isn’t Stone Arch specific, but it involves one of our books. Actually, one of the books I wrote: Ooze Slingers from Outer Space. I was reading it to a friend’s son, and at the point where Ack is about to eat a snottlebug, he gives me this sly, knowing look that says he got the joke. That was quite a thrill.

What’s the best part of your job?
Seeing the books, bound and ready for eager readers, after all the hard work that’s gone into creating them. It’s part relief and part jubilation.

What’s the hardest part of your job?
The pace. We always have something new and exciting in the works, when one set of books is down we have to get cranking on the next set, and with our creative staff ideas are buzzing about. It can get quite dizzying at times, yet the energy behind it all is invigorating.


This is the fourth post in a multi-part series that spotlights the members of the Stone Arch Books staff. Drawing of Blake Hoena by Brann Garvey.

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