Vibrant, entertaining, and brightly informative.
Fabrics tell a story of human development from the prehistoric world to the space age.
Journalist St. Clair (The Secret Lives of Color, 2017) focuses her spirited, illuminating cultural history on essential fibers that have been spun, knitted, and woven throughout time, from traces of thread discovered in Neolithic caves to the multilayered “one-person spaceships” worn by American astronauts. In each of the chapters the author presents an engaging narrative about plant- and animal-based textiles with particular significance to place and historical period. In ancient Egypt, for example, flax was harvested, beaten, and combed in a laborious process to produce fiber woven into linen, a fabric that became essential for trade, clothing, and mummification. Just as linen was associated with Egypt, silk, produced by worms feeding on mulberry trees, became a lucrative Chinese export. Fragments of the textile have been found in 8,500-year-old tombs and needles, looms, and shuttles unearthed from Neolithic sites. Some fabrics were pressed into surprising use: Although wool is heavy and porous, Viking seafarers depended on it for their sails. Sheep were abundant, and wool was woven to withstand fierce winds and rain. “By some estimates,” writes the author, “the sailcloth of the Norwegian Viking–era fleet would have required wool from up to two million sheep.” In the stratified society of medieval and Renaissance Europe, when “clothing defined who you were, what you did and your social status,” lace signified wealth and power. St. Clair stresses the importance of cotton to 19th-century America’s economy as well as its connection to slavery. Besides economic importance, fabrics can mean the difference between life and death for humans confronting extreme environments. The push to create new fabrics has led to synthetics, beginning with nylon and followed by many other materials that proved hugely profitable for manufacturers. Chemicals involved in synthetic production, however, expose workers to serious health risks, spurring the need for environmentally friendly methods of producing biodegradable fibers. The most fascinating research St. Clair reports is the effort to manufacture spider silk, coveted for its incredible strength.
Vibrant, entertaining, and brightly informative.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-480-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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