Book Reviews; Earth Knack, Participating in nature

[sam_acw]

I got these two books of amazon a couple of weeks ago and have decided to post a review so you can see what they're like.

Earth Knack: Stone age skills for the 21st Century by bart and Robin Blankenship

This is an A5 paper back and is written in chapters (glue, tools, fire, colour) which make it easy to find things. It contains a great number of line drawing illustrations and these make it easy to follow things.
It has great tutorials on net weaving, assembling a stone age tool kit and making containers.
This book is definitely not anoher survival guide and is more orientated towards craft projects using these primitive tools/skills

Participating in nature by Thomas Elpel

This is an A4 book with lots of photographs and line drawings throughout.
it has lots about primitive skills but the writer doesn't take a purist approach and is quite happy to use a SAK or a beer bottle to accomplich something.
The structure is not as straightforward but the book does read through quite nicely as a result of its central journey theme.
It has some good tutorials but uite a few are alredy on the web.

they are both good books but if I were to only get one it would be earth knack as i prefer the organisation and it had a more original set of projects/tutorials

[led]

Many thanks for the review. I'm tempted to check them out now you've whet my appetite.

[torjusg]

Haven't read the other book, but I found "Participating in Nature" to be way to simplistic and very few skills was described. There are some good tips here and there though.

Torjus Gaaren