Book Review: A Feast of Weeds by Luigi Ballerini

...ademic tome. Ballerini is erudite, witty, even bawdy at times. Ballerini’s book infuses foraging with history and meaning, Gathering, cooking and reading seems like a triad of imperatives much more appetizing than the believing, obeying, and fighting through which one famous twentieth-century dictator tried to reduce Italy to idiocy (largely succeeding) and the buying, pretending not to know, and not giving a damn about others with which his polit...

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Make Your Own Furniture

...rabbit hole deeper than those weird Q Anon folks. From the Lost Art Press book, The Anarchist Design Book. My Trad Life If hand tools are your thing or if, like me, you use a blend of hand tools and power tools, Lost Art Press has some beautiful and useful books one of which I used to make a desk for Kelly. I’d also recommend By Hand and Eye and Mortise and Tenon Magazine if trad design floats your boat. Measured shop drawings for American furnit...

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By Hand and Eye

...r instance, and the shelf spacing came from an exercise on page 131 of the book. Far from being restrictive, I found the principles in Walker and Tolpin’s book liberating. I now had a starting point for any design project. For modern folks it’s difficult to imagine working without a ruler. Walker and Toplin explain, Instead of asking, “How high is this base dimension in inches?” pre-industrial artisans would have asked, “How tall is this base in p...

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Being the Change: Peter Kalmus Book Appearances

...r shows you how to slash your fossil fuel use to 1/10 the average and still live like royalty. If you’d like to hear Peter speak you have two chances: Wednesday Aug 9, 7:00pm: Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena Friday Aug 11, 7:30pm: The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles Hope to meet some Root Simple readers at Peter’s talks!...

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Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

...eased my heart. I hope you have a chance to hear this podcast, or read her books, and if you’re like me, I hope it eases your heart, too. At one point, and I can’t remember if this was in her interview or in the book, maybe both, she tells of asking her grad students a question. She asks them, “Many of us love the natural world. What would it mean if you knew the world loved you back?” Her students, all being budding scientists, could not accept t...

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