Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter

“Studying Hammer Head, like eating Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, feels like a a very powerful training.”―Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly

Nina MacLaughlin spent her twenties operating at a Boston newspaper, sitting in the back of a desk and staring at a reveal. Craving for more tangible work, she applied for a task she saw on Craigslist―Carpenter’s Assistant: Ladies strongly inspired to apply―in spite of being a Classics top who could not tell a Phillips from a flathead screwdriver. She were given the task, and in Hammer Head she tells the wealthy and entertaining story of changing into a wood worker.

Writing with infectious curiosity, MacLaughlin describes the thrill and frustrations of creating things via hand, unearths the challenges of operating as a lady in an occupation that may be 99 p.c male, and explains how guide labor modified the way in which she sees the arena. We meet her unflappable mentor, Mary, a petite however tricky wood worker-sage (“Be smarter than the equipment!”), in addition to wild demo dudes, foul-mouthed plumbers, grizzled ironmongery shop clerks, and the colourful shoppers whose houses she and Mary work in.

Whisking her readers from task to task―construction a wall, reworking a kitchen, gut-renovating a space―MacLaughlin examines the historical past of the equipment she makes use of and the virtues and kinds of wooden. All the way through, she attracts at the knowledge of Ovid, Annie Dillard, Studs Terkel, and Mary Oliver to remove darkness from her revel in of labor. And, in a deeply shifting climax, MacLaughlin strikes out on her own for the primary time to construct bookshelves for her own father.

Hammer Head is a passionate e-book filled with sweat, swearing, bashed thumbs, and a deep sense of discovering real which means in work and existence.

8 illustrations