Alex Langlands

I'm so delighted that another member of the archaeological team that brought us the British "farm" series is turning to authorship, and doing a bang-up job of it, too. I was initially a little skeptical -- the use of craeft, with it's odd spelling seemed like a potentially pretentious sign. Instead, I found a thorough and fascinating intellectual argument woven through both personal storytelling and thoughtful investigations of how things have been done through history. Thoughtful is a great word for this book -- Langlands does a wonderful job providing a vast historical context, both past and present, and manages to avoid sinking into a quagmire of nostalgia without practical purpose. He also links the evolution of crafts in ways that that I would not have thought of, and offers a lot of food for thought for incorporating this sort of work into modern life. I learned a lot here, and I enjoyed taking my time reading it.

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