|
Book review |
| The first 250 words of the full text of this article appear below. Images appear only in PDF or full-text views. |
To many Engineering Geologists ‘of a certain age’ (graduated mid-1960 s) and outside the USA, the name Ralph Peck could mean nothing more than the second author of Terzaghi and Peck ‘Soil Mechanics in Engineering Practice’.Such is the unjust fate of the second author (Bishop and Henkel, Schofield and Wroth, Hoek and Bray, Jaeger and Cook, Lamb and Whitman – the list goes on) when in the hands of the young and ignorant. Later we can sense the error of our ways but by then it is not so easy to right our wrongs. This book goes a long way to doing just that for stepping out of these pages comes the person of Ralph Peck and the role he played as an educator and engineer in shaping the subject of soil mechanics. Ralph Peck is now a part of the history of soil mechanics and his story is not so easily told; indeed to accomplish its telling the editors, John Dunnicliff and Nancy Peck Young (Ralph Peck's daughter), have divided the work into Parts, each essentially self contained.
The book starts with a Self Portrait which is autobiographic, being the edited transcript of recordings made by Peck himself; here we first see ‘the man’. Of course one can be sceptical about such histories but here the potential of the young man is clear to see; there is no doubt in my mind that here we are listening to a man of great talent. The potential of the young
