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The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age
A wide-ranging inquiry into the nature and possibility of restoration.
- GenresHistory
288 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2000
3 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
About the author
Howard Mansfield
34 books38 followersHoward Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation as he seeks to understand the soul of American places. He is the author of a dozen books about the stories we tell each other and the ones we refuse to tell. In short, how we chose our ancestors
He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place… But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”
Among his other books are Turn & Jump, The Bones of the Earth and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”
“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”
His newest book to be published in October is Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. It's about the memorials we debate, dedicate, and then ignore.
We live in an era of monument building. Our monuments, often after fierce debate, are dedicated in ceremonies that try to bring life to the stone -- and then we walk away. The mute stones are left to the pigeons. Our grandest efforts at creating a shared, cultural memory melt to invisibility. Why?
Invisible Monuments looks at these moments of commemoration in the familiar and the unfamiliar. We visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Bunker Hill Monument, and a once- venerated World War I memorial in England. We journey to a little-known memorial that one grief-stricken family built stone-by-stone for their son lost in war, a place that still draws thousands each year.
And Invisible Monuments looks at the failure to commemorate in the recently rediscovered African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and in the unmarked graves of the Irish immigrants who built the railroads in the woods of New Hampshire. We’re also introduced to an audacious attempt to memorialize the future by building a clock deep in a mountain that is designed to run for 10,000 years.
These memorials are attempts to bring us closer to our ancestors, to say that we are still joined hand-to-hand across the centuries. In Vietnam, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, there are two burials. The first to return the body to the earth, and then the second, when the bones are dug up and brought closer to the village. We do the same.
When we commission memorials, we are trying to bring the bones closer to home. The memorials we build are a second burial. In all the current controversies about what to build and how, and what to tear down, we’ve lost track of why we build monuments. We want the counsel of our ancestors – edited, and chiseled into stone.
Invisible Monuments is about tribute, memory, and the summoning of the past.
Howard Mansfield has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Heritage, The Threepenny Review, and other publications.
He has served as a writer and consultant for museums, written and performed a stage show with composer Ben Cosgrove that was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film, and he has co-written a documentary film about “The Old Homestead: The Play of the Century.”
He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place… But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”
Among his other books are Turn & Jump, The Bones of the Earth and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”
“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”
His newest book to be published in October is Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. It's about the memorials we debate, dedicate, and then ignore.
We live in an era of monument building. Our monuments, often after fierce debate, are dedicated in ceremonies that try to bring life to the stone -- and then we walk away. The mute stones are left to the pigeons. Our grandest efforts at creating a shared, cultural memory melt to invisibility. Why?
Invisible Monuments looks at these moments of commemoration in the familiar and the unfamiliar. We visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Bunker Hill Monument, and a once- venerated World War I memorial in England. We journey to a little-known memorial that one grief-stricken family built stone-by-stone for their son lost in war, a place that still draws thousands each year.
And Invisible Monuments looks at the failure to commemorate in the recently rediscovered African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and in the unmarked graves of the Irish immigrants who built the railroads in the woods of New Hampshire. We’re also introduced to an audacious attempt to memorialize the future by building a clock deep in a mountain that is designed to run for 10,000 years.
These memorials are attempts to bring us closer to our ancestors, to say that we are still joined hand-to-hand across the centuries. In Vietnam, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, there are two burials. The first to return the body to the earth, and then the second, when the bones are dug up and brought closer to the village. We do the same.
When we commission memorials, we are trying to bring the bones closer to home. The memorials we build are a second burial. In all the current controversies about what to build and how, and what to tear down, we’ve lost track of why we build monuments. We want the counsel of our ancestors – edited, and chiseled into stone.
Invisible Monuments is about tribute, memory, and the summoning of the past.
Howard Mansfield has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Heritage, The Threepenny Review, and other publications.
He has served as a writer and consultant for museums, written and performed a stage show with composer Ben Cosgrove that was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film, and he has co-written a documentary film about “The Old Homestead: The Play of the Century.”
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 11, 2019
I could not finish reading this book. The author looks at how we preserve and present our ideas of the past in museums, old-time fairs, pioneer villages, etc. I found his descriptions of many of the places he visited very interesting and quite fun, since Roy and I used to visit lots of old tool and old farm machine fairs. However, the author seems to hate the way things are presented and spends much time blasting every place visits and complaining about how the places are perverting our view of history and culture. He may have a point but his negativity just got to be too much.
September 17, 2022
Some good insights about how restoration choices are made, how to read a building through its layers and what has been left behind after changes, and how the compulsion to preserve extends beyond materials. But there are also a lot of generalities about overarching concepts like nostalgia, memory, desire, community--this is pretty typical for historic preservation, as professionals in the field feel increasingly compelled to justify the nature and worth of their work in a broader political context. It reads more like an anthropological treatise or philosophical dissertation than it does a collection of essays on historic preservation.
There is of course abundant discussion on "sense of place," the spectre that haunts academic writing across disciplines. Mansfield offers an explanation for the pervasiveness of this obsession that feels more like a case in point than it does a true explanation: "we" are a rootless and urban people who long for the small communities that we are somehow culturally or biologically predisposed to prefer ("we" in this case clearly meaning rich white people who can afford to live in a place, or places, of personal preference). I've definitely heard this argument before, and it's not a very compelling one.
Finally, several chapters are way too long. Just typical academic writing--take 50 pages to say what you could get across in five. This book made me impatient.
There is of course abundant discussion on "sense of place," the spectre that haunts academic writing across disciplines. Mansfield offers an explanation for the pervasiveness of this obsession that feels more like a case in point than it does a true explanation: "we" are a rootless and urban people who long for the small communities that we are somehow culturally or biologically predisposed to prefer ("we" in this case clearly meaning rich white people who can afford to live in a place, or places, of personal preference). I've definitely heard this argument before, and it's not a very compelling one.
Finally, several chapters are way too long. Just typical academic writing--take 50 pages to say what you could get across in five. This book made me impatient.
sony-or-android
November 9, 2022Oddly, this is avl. directly (as an epub download) from right here on GR.
November 24, 2022
It’s not often that I read an author for the first time, and immediately want to read everything else the author has written, but that was my experience with this book.
November 9, 2011
This is a marvelous book filled with wisdom and insight about the ways in which people collect, preserve, maintain, repair, and restore. Instead of empty platitudes about the importance of restoration and preservation, Mansfield instead provides rich anthropological accounts of people in the depth of particular practices of restoration and preservation (i.e. civil war re-enactors, antique auctioneers, Old Home Day celebrations, and audio nerds collecting snippets of silence). Alongside the quotations and descriptions of people and practices, Mansfield also provides subtle and often acute commentary about the dynamics of restoration and renewal in this modern world. The result is a series of meditations that displays a thoughtful cohesiveness. I would recommend this book to a wide audience, and to anyone that enjoys reflecting on the peculiarity and ingenuity of people and groups in trying to maintain active connections with the past.
August 23, 2008
From the inside flap:
"An old farmer boasts that he has used the
same ax his whole life -- he's only had to replace the handle three times and the head twice. In an eclectic, insightful meditation on the powerful impulse to preserve and restore, Howard Mansfield explores the myriad ways in which we attempt to reconnect with and recover the past -- to use the same ax twice."
The perfect choice for a book club made up of preservationists, Mansfield touches on all those wonderfully debatable issues about authenticity, the power and/or meaning of history in the modern world, interpretation, how preservation fits within discussions of urban planning and sustainability, our need for touchstones of what is "real" and how the world seems to be losing those touchstones.
"An old farmer boasts that he has used the
same ax his whole life -- he's only had to replace the handle three times and the head twice. In an eclectic, insightful meditation on the powerful impulse to preserve and restore, Howard Mansfield explores the myriad ways in which we attempt to reconnect with and recover the past -- to use the same ax twice."
The perfect choice for a book club made up of preservationists, Mansfield touches on all those wonderfully debatable issues about authenticity, the power and/or meaning of history in the modern world, interpretation, how preservation fits within discussions of urban planning and sustainability, our need for touchstones of what is "real" and how the world seems to be losing those touchstones.
July 11, 2011
Howard Mansfield discusses this book with Whole Terrain in this blog entry
November 18, 2011
Old things are good and should be used. That's the whole premise of this book.
October 16, 2010
Poignant and thought provoking, The Same Ax Twice raises the relevant question.
October 16, 2016
Only managed about 50 pages. It's a tough read
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews