Book of the Day Roundup: February 21-25, 2022
The Wisdom of Our Hands
Crafting, a Life
Doug Stowe
Linden Publishing
Softcover $16.95 (180pp)
978-1-61035-501-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In his creative manifesto The Wisdom of Our Hands, master woodworker Doug Stowe issues a call to crafts. His stirring guide to the creative life includes reflections on building skills, crafting communities, and achieving meaning.
Stowe recalls that learning his craft was a slow process, during which supportive friendships became an important resource. Over time, he was able to build an arts and educational infrastructure in his community of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where arts and crafts are ubiquitous and respect for the environment is paramount. While Eureka Springs provided Stowe’s own framework for living a more hands-on life, he relays that it doesn’t take a special place or an established community to be a maker; the book encourages others to start where they are.
And Stowe notes that creating useful and beautiful objects, teaching others how to do the same, and writing about those experiences are all ways to build a legacy and live a fulfilling life. Whether as a vocation or a hobby, making items gives people a connection to themselves, other people, and the world around them; it’s also a way to physically manifest one’s values.
Drawing on scientific research on connections between one’s hands and mind, combined with anecdotes from Stowe’s forty-five years as a woodworker and twenty-five years as a teacher, these essays cover the importance of materials, tools, techniques, designs, and learning by hand. They also cover how crafts contribute to community-building and the reclamation of what’s real. Most of their examples have to do with woodworking, but their approaches and encouragements are transferable to anyone who crafts.
The Wisdom of Our Hands encourages people to engage themselves in crafting, applying their hearts and minds to the art of bringing about a better world.
SARAH WHITE (February 18, 2022)
Olympia
Bastien Vivès
Florent Ruppert
Jérôme Mulot
Fantagraphics
Hardcover $24.99 (136pp)
978-1-68396-517-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Three art thieves risk the biggest heist of their careers in the charming, exciting graphic novel Olympia.
Alex and Sam, absent their companion Carole, are planning to steal a valuable helmet from an army museum. They think Carole is dead, but when the two women take the stolen helmet to its prospective buyer, negotiations go awry; Carole reappears, pregnant, to help Alex and Sam escape. The women’s lives are threatened, and an offer is made: if they steal three priceless paintings, they will be free to live their lives again.
With Carole back on the team, Alex and Sam plan a grand heist of all three paintings at once. Through twists, turns, and quick thinking, they face off against a variety of threats before their final fate is revealed in a satisfying twist.
The heist elements of the book are enjoyable, with enough original ideas to surprise and delight. The characters stand out most, however. Alex is quirky and a bit flighty; Sam is capable and focused; and Carole is thoughtful and nurturing. The dynamic among those three, their minder Antonio, and other people they encounter is energetic, entertaining, and often quite funny.
Precision linework and coloring make every page a work of art, including the three-page gallery that ends the book, which features the threesome in framed paintings, meant to resemble a museum interior. This book is a sequel to The Grand Odalisque, which features the same trio of thieves, but Olympia doesn’t require familiarity with the first book; it stands on its own merits as a savvy, scintillating thriller.
PETER DABBENE (December 27, 2021)
For Want of Wings
A Bird with Teeth and a Dinosaur in the Family
Jill Hunting
University of Oklahoma Press
Softcover $21.95 (260pp)
978-0-8061-7661-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Jill Hunting’s For Want of Wings is the enrapturing, wide-ranging, and thoughtful account of her great-grandfather’s discovery of a rare dinosaur fossil in 1872.
Tom Russell was on a Yale student expedition to Kansas when he unearthed a nearly complete skeleton of the Hesperornis regalis, a toothed, aquatic bird dinosaur. The discovery was groundbreaking, drawing a definitive link between birds and reptiles. It was one of a group of fossils heralded by Charles Darwin as “the best support to the theory of evolution … within the last twenty years.” Yet Russell is barely remembered today, and the striking specimen that he uncovered has faded into obscurity.
Like digging through the “sepulcher of chalk in a Kansas fossil bed,” the book begins with a few scant documents: rare historical photographs, clippings from an alumni magazine, and family hearsay. It uses these to illuminate Russell’s “inconspicuous life.” The exploration then stretches from the dusty archives of the Peabody Museum and journals of similar expeditions, to accounts of the Russell family’s ties to early abolitionists, to colorful descriptions of life on the Kansas frontier and the region’s natural history. Scientific considerations of the fossil itself are also included.
As a culmination, Hunting visits the expedition site with her college-age, activist daughter. They reflect on their shared family legacy of adventure, idealism, and curiosity. Intertwined are considerations of the meaning of history itself:
What is history if not a process that is random, accidental, and uncontrollable, a succession of chance encounters and unforeseen meetings? Interruptions. Tangents … Things cast off, recycled, and reused.
For Want of Wings is a riveting and entertaining work of scientific history that also considers the value of connecting with one’s family story. It reflects on the powerful forces that link generations across time and place.
KRISTEN RABE (December 27, 2021)
The Bear Woman
Karolina Ramqvist
Saskia Vogel, translator
Coach House Books
Softcover $17.95 (160pp)
978-1-55245-431-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Women’s stories often must be rescued from the margins of history, as a writer on a difficult research expedition is reminded in Karolina Ramqvist’s introspective novel The Bear Woman.
A writer with two children is already somewhat overwhelmed when her friend shares with her the hushed story of a 1541 expedition into Canada’s interior. Still, a portion of the tale—about a woman marooned on an island as punishment for an affair—captivates her. Despite her friend’s request that she not write about the woman, the writer is possessed. She abandons much to pursue understanding: of how the woman, of noble birth and limited experience, managed to survive for almost a year in the wild, and about why is so little preserved of her incredible tale–perhaps the first story of a successful colony in North America. Most of all, she wants to understand “What about her was so absolute that it thwarted everything else.”
Digging through archives and historical documents, and recreating what she can via her own imagination, the writer sets out to tell the woman’s story. Throughout the process, she is reminded of how often those who write history have chosen to discount women—and of what an error that is. The noblewoman in question remains unreachable before and after her time on the island because of this silencing, but the writer still chases her through a princess’s short stories and the records of an explorer. She formulates a picture: of a girl, left pregnant and alone, facing bears and wolverines, who nonetheless managed to persist. Of a woman, like all women, whose story deserves to be told on its own merit, and not as an irritating footnote to a man’s.
A harried writer seeks her footing through a sidelined sixteenth-century tale in the feminist novel The Bear Woman.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (February 18, 2022)
Gloria Steinem
Little People, Big Dreams
Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara
Lucila Perini, illustrator
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books
Hardcover $15.99 (32pp)
978-0-7112-7075-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
This entry into the hagiographical Little People, Big Dreams series celebrates feminist icon Gloria Steinem. She’s depicted with her signature streaks, raised fist, and very cool shades from the first, as she learns to challenge the status quo as the child of an unconventional family. The unfairness of gender biases strikes her early on, after which she decides to become an agent for change. Sixties colors and bold details complement this timeless story about fighting for what’s righteous.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (February 18, 2022)
Barbara Hodge
