Sean

The editor does a great job of pulling together a compelling collection of histories here. He does a good job of setting the expectations in the introduction by pointing out the larger realities that cast some shadows over the accuracy of the accounts: interviewers’ biases and tilt toward their audiences, some subjects’ hesitation to be fully honest about the families that owned them and remain nearby decades later, and just accuracy of the transcription overall. Some of this is fairly explicit in the small preface at the beginning of each account. Some of it feels more subtle in the presentation of the narrative.

All in all a good read. A difficult one to be sure in some ways, but important.

I really enjoyed this book. The author leads us from the day he just suddenly decided to pick up a trade through his development into a seasoned craftsman. His descriptions of his calling as a carpenter and his love for the work mirror the pride I felt when wearing my tools but also the shifts in my life that told me it was time to step away from the trade.

The author does a fantastic job of avoiding unexplained jargon (he even includes a glossary) while also including details that only an experienced tradesman could anticipate and appreciate. Small details like describing the replacement of carpenter pencils with more precise pencils as the work shifts from rough to finish carpentry.

I don’t know that I give this the full hearted endorsement for anyone to pick it up and read, but I know some folks who would love it and I can see myself dropping it in conversations that follow a certain trajectory. For the right person at the right place in their timeline, this is a must read.

I promise I don’t love every book I read, I’m just working through a backlog of highly recommended books I own after not reading for several years.

This book is an interesting look at Natchez, MS trying to reconcile history and tradition. These are two very different things that have the same origin point. The author is an outsider and uses his unique perspective to look at the town from angles from which it has long ago lost the ability to see itself.

He weaves this contemporary narrative with an older one highlighting the life of a formerly enslaved man who spent decades on a plantation near Natchez. Both stories are compelling and well told. I recommend this book.

Books are rarely about what they’re “about.” This seems especially true with memoirs. A great memoir is often descriptive and detailed because the author found a passion for something that helped distract from something else. Something powerful, too powerful to face at the time. This is why few memoirs I’ve enjoyed have a sequel. That part of life has been processed and put away.

The thing the author is trying to distract themselves from tends to bleed into the story eventually. In Shelley Armitage’s case, it is loss. This memoir of place becomes a memoir of coping. When she’s ready, Armitage reveals what prompted her to dive deeper into the history of her surroundings. Why now. Not with a direct explanation but by dropping in glimpses of her life outside of the Panhandle arroyos. One doesn’t need commentary to understand the appeal of escaping beyond the reach of cell phones.

And yet, this book remains a compelling portrait of a landscape rarely praised. An expanse of land that has been inhabited for thousands of years and dismissed by all outsiders for just as long. Armitage has convinced me that it deserves to be celebrated and protected beyond the state parks.

A unexpectedly great book. If anyone had told me I’d be giving five stars to a book about the Panhandle from the OU Press, I’d’ve laughed them back across the Red River where they belong. And yet…

Warning: The details in this book can get pretty explicit. Mr. Lehmann’s matter of fact recounting of the brutal tactics of the Apaches is eye opening. To think that his story, taking place in the 1870s and beyond, is happening at the same time as the history we’ve been taught is amazing. Such a stark difference in existence. Of course I’m not completely unaware of the plight of Native Americans, but this is the first narratives of this type that I’ve read. Much more compelling than detached history books and overly dramatized “documentaries.”

I loved this book. A lot. I grew up in a small town a lot like the ones the author describes in these pages, and I feel the deep nostalgia for the characters he introduces us to. They’re real.

This book was written in 1965, and some of the vocabulary hasn’t aged well. I read the second edition from 1980, and the author admits as much in a new introduction. I ordered the third edition while reading this to see if there was another introduction to go further down that path, but it was the same 1980 intro. I suspect he had changed even more by 2020 when he passed. He left a lot of pages behind for me to explore that. Even in 1965, the author seemed to tiptoe around some things I had expected to cringe at, both acknowledging them while not contributing to them.

He does well to paint a picture of the friends he made on his travels. He was after their stories, and he got them. Some harder to coax out than others. I recommend this book for anyone wanting a portrait of the time. I’ve already made a list of locations I want to visit to see what might remain almost 60 years later.

This was a great quick read. I’m a big fan of Prosek’s work, so I picked this up blindly without realizing it was written for a young audience. It’s a good account of dealing with loss on several levels. It doesn’t offer closure on all of the issues it raises, which is good. The most important lesson from these issues for a kid is not closure, but survival. Divorce and other forms of loss are survivable, even if that’s hard to see. It was the perfect read for my recent flight.

Larry Haun literally wrote the book on carpentry and he is responsible for developing many of the techniques still used today in production framing of houses, and yet, as a member of the same Union he was in for decades, I barely knew of him. At first I was surprised and almost angry that he had been glossed over by the Union. He seems like an ideal person to learn about and from in my apprenticeship. Now, having read this book, I think it’s likely that Larry created that separation.

He has a lot of great videos, books, and columns discussing best practices for construction, but this book makes it clear that his passion for construction leads him in the opposite direction of the industry. He pines for smaller scale, traditionally designed structures. He loves to build homes, not houses.

This book has chapters devoted to many different types of houses, but it isn’t a technical manual. Each chapter is as much about the circumstances and inherent qualities of the region that fueled the various building styles as it is the building techniques.

At times he can be pretty heavy handed with his views on consumerism and society, but this is his book. He could leave diplomacy in the pages of Fine Homebuilding.

All in all, a good read. You don’t need more than an appreciation of homebuilding to understand the construction aspects, but the real point here is the rest of the writing. His views shared from a life lived watching the homes he built bloat and the industry and world became more wasteful. All the while keeping his own home humble, compact, and loving. I am always at risk of dropping out of society and relocating to the mountains to build an off grid cabin, and this book gives me that itch. And a few new building styles to consider.

Wohlleben does an amazing job of making me genuinely care about the microscopic happening in the dirt of forest floors. One of my favorite books is Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire, so I felt likely to enjoy this when a friend gifted it to me. The author’s revelations about the communication capabilities of trees is at once amazing and revelatory and also, “Oh yeah, that’s makes a lot of sense.” Of course thru communicate. How could they not? But the author also fully presents their obvious limitations. For all their abilities, they remain helpless against our own intrusions. I highly recommend this and can’t wait to discuss it with the friend who gave it to me. If only they would go ahead and finish it too.

This is an easily digestible primer on the science of motivation and how to effectively use it to one’s advantage, either with oneself or as a manager. SPOILER: Don’t confuse this with a guide to manipulation, the key to success is to make things truly meaningful for the individual. The old “What’s in it for me?” tactic.

The ideas are thought provoking and well-defended but there is such a sense of arrogance from the author that it is hard to enjoy the work. I felt myself almost wishing someone would come along and poke holes throughout his whole argument.

Why set out to travel the country if you don’t want actually experience the people, places, or things? This reads like 300 pages of the absolute worst Seinfeld fan fiction you can imagine. I can’t even finish it. I kept waiting for him to have a revelation about his slur disposition and repent, but I went and read a couple other reviews and realized he does not. I only picked this up because Bill Bryson, and this book in particular, have been recommended dozens of times. I read one other of his books years ago and didn’t remember not liking it, but now I realize I don’t remember it at all. I will be leaving this one in the first Little Free Library I encounter. Good riddance.

A detailed look at the life and death of the man who wrote the soundtrack for Labor. The author does a great job of laying out the story of Joe Hill almost as a flashback to show the chain of events that landed him in jail. He sandwiches the life between the specifics of the end. A good history of the man and the movement he championed.

While described as a collection of essays (and poetry), it’s more like blog posts from the author’s website. Perhaps that snobbery on my part and those two are one and the same anymore. Kohout’s writing is honest and accessible, and her topics are varied yet interwoven. A lot of her stances and views on nature and conservation feel fairly privileged, but it made me think that the time and freedom to ponder such things is fairly privileged. As with many things, it is incumbent upon those with the means to drive the conversation of conversation. Am I doing enough? What else could I be doing? I have the ability and opportunity to explore options that many people do not to conserve or serve a greater good. Do I make the most of it? A great read to start the year.

Not what you think it is

FULL DISCLOSURE: the author and I are friends. He asked me to read his book and write an honest revIew. I did and I will. Here is that honest review:

This is not a self-help book. Self-help books and the carnival barkers that peddle them are trying to sell you on the notion that they've discovered something new and revolutionary about life, but they haven't.

For all that things that the title of this book suggests, it's really about one thing: information is universal, eternal, and empowering. You see, information, or knowledge, if you prefer, is beholden undo the Law of Conservation of Matter. It can neither be created nor destroyed, and, even if present in a different form, what we have today is what has always been. Anyone who is suggesting that they have some new information, some new message, is only trying to control the information. And the only reason to control information is to distort it and manipulate.

The author here takes a different path. His message is that there is no secret to happiness. His message is that happiness today can be achieved, and, in fact, may only truly be achieved, by following the paths of all those who came before us. Ancient wisdom that has been largely forgotten, but not lost. Largely hidden, but not secret.

As society has evolved, one's ability to profit from the exploitation of physical labor and natural resources has waned. To rely on the control of men for your own wealth is unreliable. At some point, those being controlled realize that they control the means of production and, therefore, the wealth. But information? That is much less tangible, and must rely on people to pass it down. That makes it easier to control. And why do they want to control it? See above. But, really, you don't even have to control it. You just move it out of view and then create a distraction. And before long, the information becomes forgotten. People forget the keys to happiness, and only know the distraction. And then, it's a simple task to convince them that the distraction itself is the means to happiness. And that a new and improved distraction leads to a new and improved happiness.

This book wants to remind you where real happiness comes from, where all that ancient wisdom rests, and to open your eyes to the fact that you are being distracted and manipulated. This book hopes to break the reliance upon distraction for happiness and usher in a new era of old ways. The old ways where happiness was something we went out of our way to give to others, without thinking about how to get it for ourselves.

This book is to remind you that true happiness is a gift, a reward, for making the space around us better for everyone that passes through it. It is not a cash crop one can always sow, harvest, and hoard from a place of seclusion and exclusion.

All that in only 133 pages, and it's funny too.

I read this expecting humor and satire, but it is so much more than that. It contains actual ideas that, if implemented, could be steps forward for race relations. I'm not a scholar of race relations so I can't attest to the originality of these ideas overall and this is not an endorsement for this as groundbreaking. This is an endorsement of the book for presenting the ideas in a package that will be seen and read by people like myself who otherwise wouldn't know of them. And if they are original, even better.

What a downer. Updike didn't go out of his way to make Rabbit likeable, and yet you can't help but relate to the feeling ofvwakingvup and suddenly feeling trapped by a life you never expected. If this were a single book this would be an angry review about how depressing this book was, but I'm moving on to the next one. Let's see where he runs to.