The Same Ax, Twice

Howard Mansfield has written an immensely insightful book about the ways we see our own past. If you were to say something to fault this book it would be that it has crammed twice too many ideas into half too little space, but for those of us who are tired of books with next to nothing to say, Mansfield delivers a powerhouse of ideas about where we are and where we are going. From the Wright Brothers to the Gillette razor, Mansfield explores American culture and the complex interplay between who we are and who we think we would like to become. Solid pleasure.

While parts of the book went deeper than my interest, much of it was sheer poetry. The author makes his case, which is better described in some of the other reviews than I could relate.Tools that once belonged to my father and grandfather always seem to work a little better than the ones I've bought. If you've ever had the same feeling, you'll like the book.

I loved this book! Richly layered, eloquently written, it's the most important book on restoration and preservation to be published in decades, itself a meaningful act of restoration.

Once again, Howard Mansfield has produced a brilliant book, as intelligent as it is vital, to show how our heritage is as much a part of us as is our DNA. We struggle to keep it going in a manner suggested by the title, which refers to a well-known story of a man with an ax. The handle breaks and the man replaces it, whereupon the ax head breaks and the man replaces that too. Does the man then have the same ax, or does he have a new one? An arguement could be made either way, but the important aspect of the story is that the man has the ax he needs and has never been without it. For us, the world is our ax, and is breaking apart even as we watch. We want to mend it. We want to keep what we are losing, so we carefully move old houses from the paths of bulldozers, board by board and brick by brick; we form large societies to reenacte battles of the Civil War, the armies outfitted in exact regalia down to the buttons. Such ongoing activity is not the same as the collections of relics found in museums (such as a stoppered vial containing Thomas Edison's last breath, for instance, a relic that Mansfield mentions by contrast.) We are closer to Thomas Edison when we replace a lightbulb than we are when we look at this vial of his breath. If the owner of the ax of the title had wanted a relic, he would have kept his broken ax to look at and acquired a new one to chop wood. No--he mended his old ax. And with our restorational activities, we are trying to mend the word, something that we human beings long to do with every fibre in us. Environmental magazines seem not to have noticed this important fact, nor have any of the preservationist publications. In contrast, Mansfield shows us something extremely important about ourselves in this brilliant and very readable book.