Steel: From Mine to Mill, the Metal that Made America

I have been looking for this book for a few years. I had been unable to locate it for under $100. I was pleased to find it preowned on Amazon for a fair price. The seller shipped it in a timely fashion and it was in very good condition. The book is terrific, all about the industry that my father worked in for so many years.

A wonderful story of how a British Colony, forbidden by its mother country to build new competing ironworks, grew to outperform its parent by a ratio of 90 to 16 million tons of steel in the peak production year of WW2. Stoddard traces the story of the American Dream applied big time to the ascendancy of American steel to number one in the 20th Century. He then traces the fall of our mighty steel business from first to fourth place worldwide. A sad tale of warnings seen and ignored: of failure to recognize a need to change; of management and labor trying to out score each other; of declining product quality; of over capacity; of lack of investment in facilities and innovation; of government’s lack of action to curb import of heavily subsidized foreign steel; of unfriendly tax depreciation laws.This is a beautifully written and designed book with outstanding illustrations.

It's non-fiction, yet is as easy to read and follow as a novel. The writer did an incredible amount of research and you get the results in easy to swallow doses throughout the book. The author gives you a brief history of steelmaking, then takes you on a journey from the mines through the steel mill to the finished product. It is very well-written and gives you an "up close and personal" look at the techniques and people who make steel.Full Disclosure - I worked as a contractor for Bethlehem Steel in the mid-1970's, so the historical information brought back lots of memories - both good and bad.

Lots of great detail on the evolution of steel. Even though I had a course on metallurgy and studied materials often over the last few decades (I was a nuclear engineer by profession), I often found myself confused about the timeline. I struggled to sort out how it was that high quality steel swords existed two thousand years ago, yet most metal objects for hard use were made out of wrought iron until late in the 19th Century. "Steel" puts the progress of steel into context.

The author's goal was to impress a general readership with the extraordinary work that engineers have done and still do, describing this aspect of American life -- the manufacture of useful products -- which is woefully under-reported and under-appreciated. He succeeds. This is not an engineering book, but describes the processes well enough not only to understand, but to just the right degree to enjoy the description. He also describes the lives of he people who do this work, again just to the right degree, as in enough to enjoy the story.

A very thorough history of he steel making industry.

As someone who once upon a time toiled on the blast furnace line at Gary Works, I found this book technically informed, ideologically balanced, and a pleasure to read. It's well-documented, yet addresses the human side of the rise and fall of the US steel industry. The section on the Minnesota iron mines and the Great Lakes shipping fleet was a special treat.

A good book. Arrived in excellent condition

Not what I expected but unfortunately there was very little description available

Very good read. Enjoying learning the history of steel making and about the people/companies who were instrumental in making the industry into what it is today. My only complaint is that the book was hipped in a bubble envelope instead of a box, and two of the hard cover corners were damaged in shipping.