Review by Mary Case

Howard Mansfield's The Same Ax, Twice is about "restoration, original spirit, accidental invention, and 'the dumfoundering abyss' between object and person." Mansfield muses lyrical, meandering between preservation of tools, the night sky and mammoth bones; historic house visits, and the collector's hissing whisper "come back, come back" as evidenced by the popularity of on-line auctions and Antiques Roadshow and frenzied bidders in a pitch-dark Quonset hut in up-state New York on a icy winter night when the electricity fails.

He brings to mind important, obvious ideas I'd not yet considered: the loss of quiet to the snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park. Did you know that the highest carbon monoxide levels in the nation can be experienced in Yellowstone on winter weekends? He calls quiet the forgotten resource. What is ocean traffic noise doing to the acoustically attuned whales? For thirty-six hours they were silent, after a 1994 low-frequency sound experiment that broadcast through five oceans.

Machine happiness. Mansfield introduces us with kindness to "poets of gears and torque," to men happy to sit and regard their engines. He speaks of the peace of an antique machine engine meet, where people have wandered away from their own time into a noisy, collective recreation of the past. They have replaced the noise of the present with that of the past.

Flow. "A messy vitality." Speaking of New York City, Mansfield uses the constant motion of people, transportation devices, buildings, ideas, of course, capital, and even graveyards, as a way to explain a very American way of life, a vanishing act always with a new chapter ahead. He moves on to highlight a railroad yard, now a parking lot, soon to be a new town center.

Read this book when dreaming, maybe in the cool shade of an overhanging backyard tree, on a cross-country train, or at the end of a mountain vacation in a snug cabin with winter's worst outside. Read it when you want to reconnect with your past, when you want to remember our history, or maybe even when seeking inspiration for preserving the vitality of your neighborhood, your family, or your life.