ngineering is a discipline that separates the men from the boys. This is easy to prove: Give an unassembled bicycle to an average man and an average boy and you can bet the boy will tinker for a while and then get the whole thing put together (and have fun doing it), while the man desperately tries to remember which kind of screwdriver is a Phillips, gets frustrated, gets distracted, and gets up to grab a beer. The best engineers, be they male or female, are a lot like boys. They have a boy's obsessive inquisitiveness, his love of trial and error, his natural knack for fixing and fuddling and fooling around with gadgets for hours without getting the least bit bored. They don't look at designing and building as a task; for them, it's playtime.

At sixty, Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of civil engineering and professor of history, is still a boy. His books, from To Engineer Is Human to The Evolution of Useful Things, have described the evolution of pencils, bridges, bookshelves--all sorts of products of the mind--with an innocent delight. His new childhood memoir, Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer, is also the tale of the evolution of a useful thing. But it is vastly different from any he has written before, primarily because a young engineer, unlike Petroski's other subjects, is not engineered per se. Boys (and girls) are too complex a creation for that. Nature can only genetically engineer so much of a child; the rest is up to nurture. Petroski's memoir is not as clear-cut or straightforward as his other books, but it makes for an intriguing tale of what happens when a child with a natural predisposition toward engineering is encouraged, by teachers or free time, to develop it.

The book is also a testament to the indefatigable curiosity of boys. We join Petroski on the cusp of adolescence in Cambria Heights, Queens. It is 1954 and, on his twelfth birthday, he is scrambling to piece together a new bike before his well-meaning but technologically hapless father can get his "meaty hands" on it. To the unexpected delight of his father, young Petroski succeeds.

The bike leads to a gig delivering the Long Island Press, and the protagonist sets off on the route to adulthood. Along the way, he meets a cast of coming-of-age characters: the older paperboys who smoke cigarettes on their breaks and reveal to him "how babies are made," the teacher who always gets his name wrong and is probably doing it on purpose, the cute girl. These episodes are painted with the brushstrokes of Norman Rockwell, quaint and warm vignettes in learning the ways of life.

Petroski deftly evokes the mid-1950s of his youth with the help of Press headlines that punctuate the book: McCARTHY 'JURY' WILL READ FBI LETTER, MORTY GOLD ROBBED OF BIRTHDAY JEWELS, CHINESE REDS FREE 9 YANK CIVILIANS. (As the author notes, though they were actually typeset in upper and lower case, headlines tend to stick in the memory as all-caps.) Petroski is living these historic experiences without realizing, or particularly caring, that they are historic. "After delivering the paper for a while, Press boys might have been able to recognize a folded copy of the Press lying on a stoop at thirty feet, but they could not say what was in it," he writes. "No matter what the dateline, front-page headlines would pass under the eyes and between the fingers."

He prefers folding the paper to reading it. Actually, proper folding is the key to his success as a paperboy. He becomes utterly fixated on putting together a bundle that will stay in one piece when launched onto a porch. The enterprise is so complex that it takes him an entire chapter, with a photo illustration, to describe it. The same attention to detail would serve him well later in his career.

Petroski is not writing Paperboy: Confessions of a Cambria Heights Kid, in which case the cute girls would be central figures and the technicalities would be, well, technicalities; he is writing about the engineer at age twelve, for whom technicalities are central. In the end, that is what makes this memoir so charming. Many writers of Petroski's age could have delivered Rockwellian reminiscence, but few could convey, in an adult voice, the fascinations and obsessions of the young so convincingly.

We all become preoccupied as children, whether with Star Wars or piano-playing or building a better newspaper. For most, these manias are fleeting, but a few of us remember and cherish the details throughout our lives. The more fortunate--often engineers--find ways to parlay their childhood passions into careers. Petroski is in this last, lucky group. And we are luckier for his account of it.

--Mary Carmichael

hen Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul came from England in the late 1980s to tour the American South, he selected a certain quiet, unassuming man to take him around North Carolina. Naipaul wanted someone who could show him the farms, churches, graveyards, and universities, and explain the history of the land. The man Naipaul chose had grown up on a Carolina tobacco farm, like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him; he had become a poet, and had gone on to become a celebrated professor of English at Duke University.

Naipaul documented his wanderings with James Applewhite in his book A Turn in the South. He describes Applewhite with great affection: "He was a slender man, narrow-waisted, concerned about exercise. He took all my inquiries seriously, and spoke from the heart, without affectation, with a farmer's matter-of-factness, offering me at once, as soon as he saw that I was receptive, thoughts he would have spent some time arriving at."

Naipaul repeatedly marvels at how much he and Applewhite have in common, though they come from such different worlds. Each feels alienated from his homeland--the far-off island of Trinidad and the leafy, hot Carolina farm--and each uses his writing to examine the beauty and evils of the past and the drastic changes this century has witnessed. Toward the end of A Turn in the South, Naipaul calls his conversations with Applewhite "extraordinary."

What was it about this narrow-waisted Jim Applewhite that so deeply moved V.S. Naipaul? One only need turn to Applewhite's latest volume of poems, Quartet for Three Voices. His lucid and haunting poetry reflects upon the history of North Carolina and the history of his own family, which once owned slaves: "Accepting its sweetness and bitter illusions/I've lived four-fifths of my life in this South/that believed in a lie we all still suffer for." Applewhite's poems vividly recollect the delights of the South and the joys of his childhood, but often with a dark edge: "we suck on/apples of fallen orchards."

The fallen orchards represent a favorite theme of Quartet for Three Voices--people and places aging and decaying over time. In the standout poem "A Fictive World," Applewhite grapples with the memory of his grandparents who "disbelieved change" and didn't want to admit they were growing old. He recalls his grandfather singing "Sunrise Tomorrow" even as he was close to death, and how nothing ever changed inside their house: "the celery, deviled eggs,/pickles and olives in narrower and wider dishes, iced/tea in cut-glass goblets on stems, the turkey sliced on/the sideboard by old Aunt Eliza." The deviled eggs, the goblets, the hymns: it was all comforting, but it also meant hiding from the real world, telling "lies/against time."

Applewhite believes in telling the truth--acknowledging change and learning from the past: "The history I breathe is alive, exists to save." No poem addresses this hope more directly than "The Deed," the best poem of the collection, with its fresh imagery and an honest reckoning of the past. In it, Applewhite has decided to sell his family's farm, which leads him to remember its long history. Rich musical language describes the farm's boundaries--"Beginning at Toisnot Swamp then/southwest for eighty-six chains," as well as the surface of the land--"scrub oak and blackberry tangle" and "loblolly pine." In a dark and brilliant image, he recalls "the swamp-stream switching its channels/like a snake when you chop its head off, twisting in dirt."

Applewhite confronts his farm's mixed history by intoning a litany of names. On paper, the farm has been transmitted to "John, Martha, Elisha,/and Isaac," but he remembers another string of names, "Beedy, Lewis, Offy;/Wealthy, Feruba, Bright; Tabitha/Mereca, Jinnna, and Litha," the slaves who lived and worked on this land. He writes their names in his poem hoping their "story will last," even though, over the years, fires burned through the farm's cemetery and "erased whatever chalked letters/once named you on the blackened/boards of heart pine." He sells the farm, lays aside his guilt over its history, and ends the poem with an image of hope, the fields feathered with broomsedge and "preparing/for the new generations of pines."

Applewhite's rich and lyrical poetry does the same work as the fertile broomsedge, preparing a new generation of readers for growth. The poems in Quartet for Three Voices brim with wisdom and insight as he reflects on the past century, both recording history in his poems and bringing a new understanding of the past. "Now/I know only backwardly," he declares, but these years of experience in the hands of a masterful poet make for extraordinary and powerful writing.

--Jynne Dilling Martin

Martin, a freelance book reviewer, works for Random House.