Book Review: Material by Nick Kary

• Title: Material: Making and the Art of Transformation
• Author: Nick Kary
• Year: 2020

Two things became obvious to me by the time I reached chapter three:

1. The writing style of this book, while perfectly fine for what the book ended up being (more on that in a moment), was not to my liking and was already driving me to skip whole paragraphs.
2. The work is primarily a memoir, not, as I expected, a study of people keeping old handcrafting skills alive. I’m not a big fan of memoirs. Other people get a lot out of them, but they usually come off as self-indulgent to me.

Rather than continuing to skim the thing hoping the author would finally stop extolling the virtues of Devon and get down to talking about the craftspeople, I cut my losses and quit reading. The author writes well; it’s just not to my taste.