Interesting Book - "Why Things Break: Understanding the World by the way it Comes Apart" by Mark E. Eberhart. ISBN 1400048834 USD $12.95
The focus of the book is Eberhart's life long interest in fracture and "Why things break" VS "when things break" scientifically .. the standard practical interest in fracture in design.
Early in his life, he deduced that the why of fracture was ultimately a property of the interatomic bonds, but that the chief proclaimers of bonding - the Chemists - were doing nothing about the fracture problem and he had to seek elsewhere. Ultimately he landed at MIT.
He begins by defining man's first technology as fracture.... the breaking of rocks to form useful tools. This technology was refined by trial and error for close to a million years until the first age of metals, which also progressed by trial and error through copper, bronze, iron and steel.
The _science_ of metals (and load bearing materials) was really as recent as the 20th century. The_engineering_ and _use_ of these materials is much older.
NO EQUATIONS and NO ILLUSTRATIONS.
This book isn't as explanatory as "The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor" by James Edward Gordon.
It reads quite fast and stimulates the mind.
Jim