by Harvey Green ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2006
A bit much for some readers, but certain to please the legions of woodworking aficionados.
A fact-filled celebration of wood in human history.
Green (History/Northeastern Univ.), a New Hampshire woodworker and author (The Uncertainty of Everyday Life 1915–1945, 1992, etc.), lays out all you could ever want to know about wood—and then some—in this informed, lively and genial account of the “amazing” substance that has given us everything from naval empires to heat and shelter to toothpicks. In thematic chapters, the author describes the structure and appearance of types of wood, how wood is used to create things (ships, furniture, etc.), its role in warfare and play, the aesthetics of woodworking and the ways in which human existence has been altered by small wooden things (matchsticks, clothespins, pencils). Encyclopedic enough to be a useful reference, the book conveys the craft and pleasures of working with wood and the importance of the “great triumvirate” of the shipwright, the carpenter and the cooper in pre-industrial and early industrial societies. Green covers the nitty-gritty of making barrels, houses and other things wooden, but also reflects on their cultural meaning: Boxes, for example, “create security; they carry secrets.” Wood, he adds, figures greatly in matters of status and power, as witness thrones for the king and a stool for you, and the fact that “Captains of industry get real wood in their boardrooms and offices.” The author becomes cranky about mindless clear-cutting, and takes delight in our continuing fascination and need for the more “real” and “historical” qualities of wood even in this age of steel and synthetics. New materials are used to make gunstocks, toys, car floorboards and church pews, he notes—“But if all this new stuff is so great, why is so much of it molded and colored to look like wood?”
A bit much for some readers, but certain to please the legions of woodworking aficionados.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03801-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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More by Harvey Green
BOOK REVIEW
by Harvey Green
by Lulu Miller illustrated by Kate Samworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Patrik Svensson translated by Agnes Broomé ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2020
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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