The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement – Marq De Villiers
The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement. By Marq De Villiers. (Toronto: Sutherland House. 307pp. Cloth, $34.95).
When I took a History of Technology course in graduate school, we always started out each class by naming the technology in the book we had read. They ranged from cigarettes to vaccines to nuclear power plants to cars to the SST. In The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement, the technology at hand is wood. In his introduction, De Villiers states that he hopes the essays based on the subjects in his title will stand alone, and they do, so much so that they almost seem disjointed from the rest of the text (x). The book is at is most revealing and enjoyable when De Villiers writes about the history of wood and forests in the chapters that intersperse the eponymous essays.
Unfortunately, De Villiers tries to include so much information in these chapters that they just read like long lists of tree types or wood types and or whatever the case may be. In the violin chapter he even states “The following far-from-complete list is comprised of violin makers whose work is widely recognized as outstanding” (229). There follows one of the dizzying lists that begs the question: is this list necessary?
But that is perhaps, nitpicking. The only chapter that really falls on its face is the one on schooners, which merely describes how schooners were built will placing them only in scanty context. He does much better in the chapters on longbows an violins. But again, the most enjoyable and important part of the book is his work on the history of wood and forests, ranging from perhaps lesser known topics like whether trees can communicate with each other and read human minds, to the more familiar controversy over how to maintain modern forests, for example, through the use of controlled burns or re-seeding. I think it would be better if the book had been marketed on those chapters.
This book might be passable in an introductory history course for undergraduate students in environmental history, but its lack of contextual historicizations means it pales next to competitors like Changes in the Land. Still, it is a good start for someone looking for a casual read with important educational overtones.
