Hammer Head - The Making of a Carpenter (Hardcover)

Nina MacLaughlin spent her twenties working at a Boston newspaper, sitting behind a desk and staring at a screen. Yearning for more tangible work, she applied for a job she saw on Craigslist-Carpenter's Assistant: Women strongly encouraged to apply-despite being a Classics major who couldn't tell a Phillips from a flathead screwdriver. She got the job, and in Hammer Head she tells the rich and entertaining story of becoming a carpenter. Writing with infectious curiosity, MacLaughlin describes the joys and frustrations of making things by hand, reveals the challenges of working as a woman in an occupation that is 99 percent male, and explains how manual labor changed the way she sees the world. We meet her unflappable mentor, Mary, a petite but tough carpenter-sage ("Be smarter than the tools!"), as well as wild demo dudes, foul-mouthed plumbers, grizzled hardware store clerks, and the colorful clients whose homes she and Mary work in. Whisking her readers from job to job-building a wall, remodeling a kitchen, gut-renovating a house-MacLaughlin examines the history of the tools she uses and the virtues and varieties of wood. Throughout, she draws on the wisdom of Ovid, Annie Dillard, Studs Terkel, and Mary Oliver to illuminate her experience of work. And, in a deeply moving climax, MacLaughlin strikes out on her own for the first time to build bookshelves for her own father. Hammer Head is a passionate book full of sweat, swearing, bashed thumbs, and a deep sense of finding real meaning in work and life.

General

Imprint:	W W Norton & Co Inc
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	March 2015
First published:	March 2015
Authors:	Nina Maclaughlin
Dimensions:	218 x 152 x 25mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Rough front
Pages:	240
ISBN-13:	978-0-393-23913-3
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Poetry texts & anthologies > General
LSN:	0-393-23913-6
Barcode:	9780393239133

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!