Hammer. Nail. Wood.: The Compulsion to Build - Softcover

Glynn, Thomas P.

3.68

19 ratings by Goodreads

9781890132064: Hammer. Nail. Wood.: The Compulsion to Build

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890132063 ISBN 13: 9781890132064

Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co, 1998

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Hammer. Nail. Wood. is not quite a novel and not quite a construction manual, but it's a great read that will entertain and amaze while passing along a bounty of helpful information about how a post-and-beam house is put together. Readers who are experienced builders will grin with recognition, while aspiring builders will be given fresh insights into the joys and frustrations of the self-building process.

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Review:

Glynn has written an exceptional book here, not strictly a "how-to" book and not precisely a novel, but a beautifully, movingly written account of his "compulsion to build" and his experiences as a result of it. This is the quintessential "learning-by-doing" story, giving the reader not only the nuts and bolts of building a house, but pulling one in to a compellingly written, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, but always readable story of one man's obsession to build a house. --Mark Hetts

From Publishers Weekly:

The impulse behind this book is good: a meditation by an inexperienced but enthusiastic narrator on building his own house. But while it is more intimate than Tracy Kidder's House, the inevitable plumb line for house books, it oversteps intimacy into preciosity. For Glynn (The Building), building is less a workaday experience and more a metaphor that allows esoteric descriptions of how carpentry is like sex, or rambling pseudo-spiritual musings in which thinking about how to repair a drain pipe turns into "I do not remember making that repair, though I must have. I do remember something else though. The sky opened. I saw something. I saw how miraculous everything was. Everything just was." What Glynn lacks in building skills and knowledge, he makes up for in determination, and that is evident here. But in his effort to make the particular universal, his human characters become less memorable than his nails. Perhaps Glynn wants readers to relate better to an adjustable wrench with square jaws and a wooden handle framed in iron than to a local Korean War vet who skids down roads on his head and winds up stabbed by a young girl who pets bees. The book's ending brings little closure, neither for the house (which continues as Glynn's ongoing project) nor for the people who live in and around it.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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