"The Atomic Chef: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error" (Steven Casey)

This book, reviewed by Scott Schappel in American Scientist aims at showing "how design and technology all too often leave unwitting humans on the brink of disaster". Some excerpts of the review:

Written in the style of a thriller by Tom Clancy or Dan Brown, these vignettes skillfully draw the reader into the world of human error and design flaws. But Casey isn't writing fiction—these 20 stories and the characters involved are all too real, and some of the facts he reports are chilling. (...) There are lessons to be learned from all of these accounts, from the chapter about a California freeway driver fed up with traffic to the story of a near-catastrophic nuclear explosion. Casey doesn't offer remedies for the design and technological flaws he presents. But that may not be a failing at all—in some dark and twisted way, leaving the reader to ponder how to fix things may make the book even more compelling and useful. After all, real life doesn't hand us easy solutions.

Why do I blog this? seems to be a must read for people embracing the real world's messiness.