ROPE

A rival to fire and stone tools as a pivotal human innovation.

Queeney demonstrates that a seemingly prosaic subject is anything but. Tying our planet together with cordage, he surveys the history of rope, its materials and uses, its symbolic significance to varied cultures, and its indispensable role in countless human technologies and entertainments, ancient and modern. In the process, he recounts the history and development of some of these often-revolutionary uses of rope, from raising the pyramids of Egypt and nautical riggings in the Age of Sail to great feats of mountaineering and future space exploration. Acknowledging rope’s many other commonplace yet no less vital functions, he concludes: No rope, no civilization. “The ingenuity and invention of the earliest human minds gave us a tool with which we made the world,” writes Queeney, the former editor of and columnist for Ocean Navigator. The author’s technical expertise and caliber of research suggest a wide-ranging mind. This faculty is wed to a felicitous if sometimes cheeky writing style that, for some, may rely too heavily on high-tech and applied sciences terminology. Yet it would be hard to explain the processes described without it, and one suspects aficionados will find the detail more fascinating than dry. Queeney does not shrink from depicting the darker uses of rope through the millennia, from torture to the gallows, but by the close, he reveals rope as a potent metaphor for human society and the fibers that bind us. The next time readers hold a length of rope in their hands, it will be with heightened respect and admiration.

Not simply a history of rope, but of the coils of whole peoples.