Vibrant, entertaining, and brightly informative.
Fabrics tell a story of human development from the prehistoric world to the space age.
Journalist St. Clair (The Secret Lives of Color, 2017) focuses her spirited, illuminating cultural history on essential fibers that have been spun, knitted, and woven throughout time, from traces of thread discovered in Neolithic caves to the multilayered “one-person spaceships” worn by American astronauts. In each of the chapters the author presents an engaging narrative about plant- and animal-based textiles with particular significance to place and historical period. In ancient Egypt, for example, flax was harvested, beaten, and combed in a laborious process to produce fiber woven into linen, a fabric that became essential for trade, clothing, and mummification. Just as linen was associated with Egypt, silk, produced by worms feeding on mulberry trees, became a lucrative Chinese export. Fragments of the textile have been found in 8,500-year-old tombs and needles, looms, and shuttles unearthed from Neolithic sites. Some fabrics were pressed into surprising use: Although wool is heavy and porous, Viking seafarers depended on it for their sails. Sheep were abundant, and wool was woven to withstand fierce winds and rain. “By some estimates,” writes the author, “the sailcloth of the Norwegian Viking–era fleet would have required wool from up to two million sheep.” In the stratified society of medieval and Renaissance Europe, when “clothing defined who you were, what you did and your social status,” lace signified wealth and power. St. Clair stresses the importance of cotton to 19th-century America’s economy as well as its connection to slavery. Besides economic importance, fabrics can mean the difference between life and death for humans confronting extreme environments. The push to create new fabrics has led to synthetics, beginning with nylon and followed by many other materials that proved hugely profitable for manufacturers. Chemicals involved in synthetic production, however, expose workers to serious health risks, spurring the need for environmentally friendly methods of producing biodegradable fibers. The most fascinating research St. Clair reports is the effort to manufacture spider silk, coveted for its incredible strength.
Vibrant, entertaining, and brightly informative.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-480-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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