Forty years after its original publication, David McCullough's masterful history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge has become a classic work and is now being reissued with a new preface from the author. The building of the Brooklyn Bridge was a time of optimism and corruption, a time when Americans were the world's greatest engineers and could collectively create a civic -- and national -- monument of supreme distinction. The experience offers lessons to us today, which McCullough will emphasize in his new preface.