Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning through Making

by Anna Ploszajski

From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good understanding of the properties of many different materials. However, science can’t tell us how to measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or how to sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or what it feels like to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade tells the story of materials through making and doing. Author and material scientist Anna Ploszajski takes readers into the domain of the makers and craftspeople to understand how our most popular materials really work. Their accumulated knowledge through hands-on trial and error has been built on by generation after generation of experimenters and tinkerers, and they understand the materiality of objects far more than any scientist with a textbook.

This book offers a fresh and entertaining perspective on materials science through the eyes of a young woman who is at the forefront of the field, as well as the craftspeople who have built their careers around working with certain materials. Each chapter is dedicated to an everyday material and features Anna’s accounts of learning from masters in the craft. Along the way she builds a fuller picture of materials and their place in society. She visits a female blacksmith artist to see, hear, smell and strike steel herself, explores how working with one of the most primal of materials, clay, has brought about some of the most advanced technologies and delves down to the atomic scale of glass to find out what makes it ‘glassy’. By the end, readers will have a new understanding of the materials they encounter every day and an appreciation for the skills needed to form them into the objects that are perfectly suited for the jobs they do.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Audiobook

320 pages, Hardcover

Published May 13, 2021

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 1 out of 5]

I usually love this kind of book, but this was such a disappointment. The title is fairly misleading. Ploszajski does very little making—for most materials she just interviews someone, or goes to an afternoon workshop. The book is also neither about her as a scientist—the personal stories she relates generally have nothing to do with her career in science—nor about the science of materials. The science she does relate is trivially shallow. That trees have growth rings is about as deep as it gets in the chapter on wood, for example. The chapter on sugar doesn't even go that far, and is entirely about Ploszajski's swimming hobby (you see, sugar is a good source of calories for athletes).
The writing is also poor, purple, and padded.

Much more successful books along these lines are "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down," by J.E. Gordon, and "Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, From Homemade to Haute Cuisine," by Brenner, Sörensen, and Weitz.

> Wool’s rescue came from a development in the 1970s called superwashing. This process uses an acid bath to remove the scales from the outside of wool fibres. Without these scales, the outer surface of the fibre becomes smooth like a synthetic fibre, such that superwashed wool can be machine-washed without fear of shrinkage from felting.

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a lovely mix of science and experiences. The material science element was explained clearly and easily, and it being sprinkled throughout the book in between the authors own experiences made it easy to digest. It also meant that there was no danger of the infamous info dump!

What I really loved was the accounts of her experiences getting to know the materials outside of the lab, going to creative workshops and getting hands on. It kept me more interested in the book than something that was purely scientific would have done.

I also appreciated how this book was structured. A chapter for each material made it easy to work through - I'd read a chapter or two a day and come back the wanting to know about the next material. Surprisingly, the chapters on plastic and sugar were my favourite - which I think is because of the personal significance it held for the author.

It was a really enjoyable read, and I will probably come back and re read specific chapters several times!

Overall this was an interesting book, and if you want to understand more about the materials in our everyday lives, then this is the book for you.

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rather disjointed book, interesting in parts but lacking a coherent thread. The author isn’t at ease with herself and that shows in the writing.
Personally I can take my science straight.

[Nelson Zagalo]

I was a bit disappointed because the book ends up being a mix between memoirs of academia and conversations about general materials without any depth. Too light-hearted, I'd say it's more a text for a podcast conversation than a book with a science background.

[Terence Eden · Rating 5 out of 5]

You might know Dr Anna Ploszajski from her ‘rial talk podcast, or her TED talk, or her various Science Showoff videos. I was lucky enough to catch one of her stand-up sets at EMF a few years ago and have been a fan ever since.

This is a surprisingly personal and autobiographical book – I was expecting a bit more of a dry textbook, but was excited to find out that it was so much more. At times it is frighteningly intimate, all the while relating the academic back to the personal.

The book feels like a multi-part YouTube series. It has lots of fascinating places and local characters, and exciting adventures hitting things and breaking them. It doesn’t require too much background knowledge in physics to understand what’s going on. Famously, Stephen Hawking was told that every equation in “A Brief History of Time” would halve sales and Dr Ploszajski seems to have taken that advice on board. It could benefit from a few illustrations – I found it a bit hard to visualise exactly how hexagonal sheets of molecules might actually look, for example.

Some of the chapters covered material I was already familiar with, but she always found a new angle to interest me. It’s a beautiful book about the structure of “stuff” – but it also so much more than that. Science isn’t just white-coated boffins stuck in a lab. It is real people, doing amazing things, doing boring things, doing unusual things – all trying to make sense of our little planet.

It isn’t a textbook – it is a manifesto for diving into the world and getting your hands messy.

Brilliant!

[Ashok Krishna · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has tried to write a book by fusing science the genres of memoir and history. Good attempt though it may be it fails to evoke interest in any of them. Could have been more engaging by being solely focused on any two of them. I picked up this book hoping this would be similar to the works of Bill Bryson but nope, it wasn't meant to be. 2.5 stars is the best I can do. :-(

[Nicola Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

We look at objects, materials and ‘stuff’ everyday, but how much do we actually know about it? I can definitely say my knowledge on the everyday items and objects in my life was sorely lacking.

The author - Anna Ploszajski has a great way of writing and communicating science, and it was one of those effortless popular science books which caters for the masses as well as appeals to the hardcore science lovers.

Glass, plastic, steel, brass, clay, sugar, wool, wood, paper and stone are all stars of the show in this book, with a dedicated chapter on each of these amazing materials. How they’re made, how they feature in our lives and the author having a go at getting involved in the process of each material. Fun to read!

The author is very personable and I love her style of writing. The book is written in a very well balanced way, being a perfect mix between the hardcore science and experiences and life of the author, with a little bit of humour thrown in. I personally love books like this as it not only has an element of learning something new, but also details what it’s like in the field on a personal level and felt like a story of the authors tales and experiences too.

It’s such an interesting field; I’m amazed at how the things I look at everyday I know next to nothing about. I thought ‘yeah, I know a fair amount on physics’ as I love reading about this subject however when it comes to material science, this lesser known field was something my knowledge was not overly extensive. So I learnt a lot reading this. I’ll now definitely have a new appreciation for the ‘ordinary’ things around me.

I was lucky enough to read this with thanks to the author and publisher via Netgalley in return for thoughts and an honest review.

[Dave Allan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book isn't perfect but it's a fine way of introducing people to Materials Science and how that science impacts our understanding of materials and what they give us. I loved the way a material is structured or changed for use is then taken down to a simplistic atomic level. The anecdotes and meeting makers was great in that it personalised the story and made it more like a story though wasn't the highlight for me.

Anna is an excellent communicator and this is the true highlight. It's an easy read but suddenly you have to focus and concentrate as the properties, structures and interactions of materials are being discussed in detail and it's fascinating understanding the chemical properties and changes taking place.

I've been married to a Materials Scientist for 25 years, she's currently Chair of one of the IOM3 bodies and that's given me a fascination of the science. This is the first truly readable and accessible books on it I've come across.

[Michalina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This might be a case of too high expectations.

I was excited about this book from how it was advertised, as stories of a material scientist discovering crafts. I'm a nerd, I love crafts, and I don't know much about material science so I thought that this book would be a treat for me. Unfortunately, it has some traits that I personally find very annoying. While chapters are organised by a single materials, the thread of thought jumps around in each of them, making them a bag of random science facts, muddled with personal stories that seem to indicate that author things poorly for its readers: "surely the science must be hard to them, we must mix it up with more "personal" and "relatable" content" /s (that is not relatable at all). This way book feels too watered down and makes the author sound patronising and self-centred.

[Sophia Iguana · Rating 4 out of 5]

not the best book I read so far, but it motivates to start a bunch of new hobbies.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning through Making is an interesting monograph in the Sigma series, on materials and how they're utilized by Dr. Anna Ploszajski. Released 27th June 2023 by Bloomsbury on their Sigma imprint, it's 320 pages and is available in paperback and ebook format. (Other editions available in additional formats). It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is emphatically *not* a tutorial or crafting guide. What it is, is a materials scientist's exploration of materials and how their characteristics relate to their use and suitability to craft different purposes. The author is meticulous and clearly knowledgeable and goes into depth about the physical properties of each material she covers. The writing is not academic,

The book is arranged into chapters by subject: Glass, Plastic, Steel, Brass, Clay, Sugar, Wool, Wood, Paper, and Stone. The work is not too technical for laypeople to understand and the chapters are not annotated. There is a cross referenced index with live hyperlinks in the back of the book.

The style is chatty and accessible. I found the information and history interesting.This would make a good choice for public library acquisition, maker's groups, materials science and popular science readers.

Four and a half stars - with the codicil that readers pick it up forewarned.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

[Nicola Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keep going with this book, because you will almost certainly find out something you never knew before. The author studied Materials Science at university, which looks at the structures and properties of materials, and in this book explores how to actually make things with various materials. The materials vary from Steel to Wool, so there is a wide range of techniques and history covered. The author describes the processes very well (and with a good leavening of humour) so it is very visual, and I could see this an engaging television series. You do learn quite a lot about the author′s life throughout the book, since she is the one trying out the various processes over different stages of her life, which may not appeal to you if you just wanted neutral descriptions.

I started this review be saying ′Keep going′, because it did take me a while to get into it. I stopped and started the chapter on Glass several times, but the next chapter on Plastic was one of the most interesting in the book. And then in later chapters, connections between the materials begin to appear, which I found fascinating and sent me bouncing to and fro in the book. I′d never heard of Materials Science before this book, and I thought it was a very clever introduction for the lay person.

I had a copy of this book early through Netgalley

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be generally an enjoyable read, especially due to the author's careful attention to the details of each of the materials she approaches. Each chapter comes off more like a literary essay about the material at hand, which I liked because it offered a well-rounded examination of the material and its place in our lives.

Like most authors of literary essays, she does not shy away from bringing herself and her own views into focus. But that is where I felt the book sometimes lost its way; it almost felt sometimes like Ploszajski was forcing something personal into her approach to a given material. It worked when the association was natural - for example, her connection to brass through her love of her trumpet - but in other cases it felt forced and distracting.

Overall still worth reading, especially if you're the sort of person who likes to know how things work. For those folks, this may be an even deeper dive than usual (sometimes down to the molecular level), but it's still fascinating.

[Paula Street · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading this book back in July for the BIG Event Book Club. I managed to read the first half before the discussion, but what with one thing and many others, I didn’t read the second half until the week between Christmas and New Year. Luckily, the book is actually nicely split into two halves. The first half focuses on the manufactured materials that are standard components of the curriculum for a degree in materials science. The second half focuses on natural materials that are not normally part of that curriculum. Each chapter focuses on a different material and includes rich introductions to the craftspeople who regularly use that material with excellent simple descriptions of their various skills and expertise, folded in with autobiography of the author. An excellent read for anyone interested in materials science, making or crafting.

[(a)lyss(a) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I liked the concept of this book, but was surprised that what I read didn't align with what I expected. Ploszajski is clearly passionate about materials and I think focusing on that could have produced a more linear book. This book isn't really about making things it's more about the materials themselves. Each chapter is broken up into a material like glass or wood and then Ploszajski talks about something she watched someone make with that material or learned about it from an expert or a class she took to learn about it. The chapters are fairly short and there doesn't seem to be much information about the actual making or the feelings behind it so much as a retelling or reaction of information about materials. Overall it's not the memoir I was expecting.

[Han · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Handmade’ provides an overview of the key materials from which we have crafted the modern world. Whilst I did enjoy this book, I found that the focus on anecdotes detracted from the examination of the materials explored throughout the narrative. I would have preferred a little more focus on the materials personally. That said, the anecdote does provide a degree of relatability and interest, so many readers may enjoy the more personal approach to the narrative. It certainly would appeal to readers of popular science that enjoy a more lighthearted approach. Overall, I would recommend ‘Handmade’ to anyone with an interest in engineering or materials science, or popular science.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Colette Brennan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Handmade is both an informative manual and a memoir. Anna Ploszjski takes us through the history of a range of materials commonly used in crafts and gives details on the manufacture and creative uses of the products. it is a highly accessible and easy-to-read book. Running parallel to this is a memoir about the connection of these materials to both her family and her life including her PhD work and her personal accomplishments. I am sure that we will be reading more from Anna in the near future.

[Valerie Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A funny, interesting scientist takes us through 10 materials, both man-made and natural. I appreciated her personal stories, but even so, I could have used a little more in-depth discussion of the materials. I get that it's for a lay audience, but maybe some diagrams and pictures would help. I was disappointed by her apolitical approach to plastic and sugar - she focuses more on her experience than what they are doing to the planet. Still, I enjoyed it, especially the natural materials (wool, wood, stone, paper).

[Fleurtje Eliza]

This was a formidable book, I thoroughly enjoyed myself getting acquainted with the atoms of all sorts of materials. I read it one chapter at a time, making sure to pace myself, as I did not want this gem of knowledge to be over too soon.

Both socially and scientifically, you'll be in for a treat and yes, this will be a perfect gift for any crafty or arty friend.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book.

[Angga Maulana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a material scientist and I have to say, I find another perspective for understanding materials properties other than through a microscope, test tube, or characterization machine in this book: personal experience with materials themselves.
It doesn't have to be a value: how hard, how tough, or how strong a material is, but we can also describe it by intimation between us and the material. This is what any craftsman and tinkerer have and what is lacking from a scientist with a textbook.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

For each of ten materials, Ploszajski offers a personal narrative, explains some history and some chemistry, and relates her own experience working with the material to produce some art or craft. It's an ambitious approach to carry through the whole book, and some elements inevitably wind up feeling forced or tangential. But overall, there's lots of interesting information about why different materials behave the way they do, presented in a clear and accessible way.

[Randal White · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm torn on how to describe this book. Is it the exploration of material science, or information on how the materials are used, or a collection of personal anecdotes? I guess it is a little of all of them. There are parts I liked, but mainly I found the book to be a bit of a disjointed and rambling mystery. Unfortunately, I don't know who I would recommend the book to. Perhaps a rewrite by the author, along with a serious editor to keep her focused. Sorry!

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful read this is. A personal, insightful, educational, emotional and funny journey through 10 materials written with heart and humility. One thing that really struck me was how much effort had been put in to bringing stories from around the world into what could have been quite a UK centric narrative. This was an utter delight!

[Sunny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A journey through everyday materials from their chemical compositions, historical relationship with us to hands-on experience of making. I found the author's personal story side a bit awkward, but the combination of chemistry and handmade attempt with the material touched the sweet spot of mine. The chapter on 'wool' was my favorite.

[Tyler Hayden · Rating 3 out of 5]

See TH Book List for review. But overall, this is an interesting book and a wicked neat concept - it really picks up in the second half for me when the author ties in the materials with her own intense, personal stories.

[Harriet · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great premise. Listened to as an audiobook narrated by the author. However it is more a memoir of he interactions with the materials through life than how interesting they are and their uses. She does try to blend the two but for me the balance is more like a memoir

[Elizabeth]

As heard on Science Clear+Vivid:
https://omny.fm/shows/science-clear-a...

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

1 part material science, 1 part maker culture, 1 part biography, and 100 parts humanity. What a thoroughly enjoyable exploration of intersections that should be far more common than they are.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed how the experiential aspects of making were enhanced by the material science facts!

[Beckie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic and fascinating book with a lovely tone. Thoroughly enjoyed.