"A young writer with the descriptive powers of John McPhee and a taciturn Yankee wit - a book that captures the essence of work in a small sawmill in the heart of New England."
Determined to prove that he is "capable of working long and hard at distasteful tasks for dubious reward," college-educated, middle-class Timothy Lewontin signs on as an apprentice sawyer at a Vermont sawmill. He is quickly plunged into a world occupied by gruff millhands toiling in a kind of nineteenth-century time warp, with the eccentric, irascible Henry Parsons presiding like a character out of a Dickens novel.....
Determined to prove that he is "capable of working long and hard at distasteful tasks for dubious reward," college-educated, middle-class Timothy Lewontin signs on as an apprentice sawyer at a Vermont sawmill. He is quickly plunged into a world occupied by gruff millhands toiling in a kind of nineteenth-century time warp, with the eccentric, irascible Henry Parsons presiding like a character out of a Dickens novel.....
