Rob Jach's Reading List So Far.

Robert Ritter Jach

D. Douglas Dent. Professional Timber Falling: A Procedural Approach.

Maybe not your typical book for this blog, but I read it, so here it is. Douglas Dent is an expert sawyer who has been involved in the timber business for over thirty years. He is known throughout the industry for his knowledge regarding timber falling. In Professional Timber Falling, Dent goes over basic terminology, equipment and general safety procedures before delving into actual felling, limbing and bucking (cutting a tree trunk into logs or blocks). A recurring theme throughout is the need to be constantly aware of one’s surroundings and the status of the tree being felled in order to saw safely. Tree size, rot, lean, compression and tension forces and nearby terrain and trees are all brought into consideration before, during and after both the face-cut and back-cut are executed. The book is loaded with diagrams and photos of actual cuts in the field. For Dent, safety is not a series of rules set by OSHA to be followed begrudgingly, but a crucial part of a specific process that not only leads to the security of the sawyer, but more efficient and, in the logging industry, more profitable cutting. Professional Timber Falling is an excellent text for anyone about to learn how to use a chainsaw; though, obviously, it does not replace hands-on-training.
175 pages. (REVIEWED BY ROB JACH)



Elizabeth Royte. Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.

Royte, who has also contributed to the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Outside among others, takes on the sticky topic of where our trash goes when we “throw it away.” In short, the reader learns that it does not just “go away.” The book follows Royte’s personal quest to find out just how her Brooklyn, NY household’s waste is disposed of, from kitchen scraps, electronics, plastics, cans, and even what gets flushed down the toilet. Using traditional research to add to her own investigations, Royte combines both rancid humor and rotting reality to write about the epic voyages our trash takes from curbside to its final resting place. Royte rides along with garbage men on their routes, snoops around landfills after their managers fail to return her calls, tours recycling plants and starts her own compost pile – with grubby results.

Trash, we learn, is a multi-million dollar industry with private companies managing most of our refuse after municipal carriers haul it from our homes to the local sanitation garage. Landfill operators pay millions to poor communities to dump garbage in their backyards. The current limits of recycling along with the pollution risks of leaky landfills are discussed at length. Perhaps the most astonishing realization Royte makes is just how trivial the space post-consumer waste occupies when compared the waste generated by corporations extracting resources, manufacturing, packaging and transporting the goods we purchase. Further indicting those corporations shirking proper responsibility, Royte gives the example of the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign. “Keep America Beautiful” (KAB) is a program funded by the likes of the American Plastics Council and the American Can Company, among over two hundred other corporations. KAB calls on individual citizens to “pitch-it” and enlists them in volunteer beach and park cleanups. But these same entities make no effort to reduce their own waste, reduce packaging, and even vehemently lobby against recycling and state bottle deposit bills (paying a nickel deposit per beer bottle, receiving it back upon its return – states with bottle bills have seen a marked decrease in glass bottles in municipal waste).

But, Royte adds, consumers can help by refusing to buy unnecessary items. Conspicuous consumption (and with it, planned obsolesce), Royte argues, is just as complicit in our enormous garbage situation as the lack of recycling. For every item not purchased, over ten times the resources used to produce it are spared. More discussion on our oil-dependency and its connection to plastics could have been included. There is also no mention of nuclear waste or the very wasteful practices of governmental agencies. Royte delivers a sometimes depressing, yet humorous call to action.
294 pages. (REVIEWED BY ROB JACH)


Karin Muller. Along the Inca Road: A Woman’s Journey into an Ancient Empire.

I’ll be visiting my sister in South America during the month of April, so I thought I had better read up on what I might expect in our travels. Muller, also the author of Hitchhiking Vietnam, spends almost seven months traversing remote villages, bustling capitals, freezing mountain passes, dusty deserts, lush rainforests and windswept beaches. Financed in part through a National Geographic grant, Muller sets upon her journey with only a skeleton of an itinerary and a six foot two vegetarian cameraman for a sidekick. Making use of the local populace’s expertise as her guide, she finds herself in the thick of a riot, a jungle cocaine-bust, deep inside a gold mine, a dancer in a troupe, and on an unsuccessful fishing trip that leaves her stomach churning. Though she visits such sites as Machu Picchu along her three thousand mile journey, she concludes that it was not the sightseeing that left a lasting impression, but the people who helped and befriended her along the way – not too mention the dozens of old women who tried again and again to teach her the “proper” way to spin llama or vicuña fleece.

Interspersed throughout her narrative are short history lessons about the rich Inca Empire, the entity responsible for the most spectacular highway constructed prior to the twentieth-century and how this empire succumbed so easily to Francisco Pizarro’s rag tag band of conquistadors. A fun read, however, I wish she included more detail regarding weather conditions, costs, and where she stayed. Though I suppose that is what travel guidebooks are for.
295 pages. (REVIEWED BY ROB JACH.)