| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oak: The Frame of Civilization. By William Bryant Logan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005. 336 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. Paper, $15.95.

"The study of the oak itself," William Bryant Logan enthuses in The Oak: The Frame of Civilization, "is a school of history, design, and society" (p. 259) because the tree is a central element in the formation of human cultures: It is a food source, religious inspiration, and building material. It "too invented us" (p. 28), he argues, and he ably shows this interdependency throughout his natural and cultural study. The first two of the book's seven main sections include a social history–centered on discussion of early humans' celebrations of the tree (rituals) and the tree's influence on last names ("the most widely used tree name in all Western languages"—p. 24); the next describes the oak's use as food in hunter-gatherer cultures (nut-eating societies or balanocultures); the fourth and fifth sections, the book's lengthiest, describe its transformation as lumber and leather in primitive structures, and its later use in more elaborate ones, primarily ships; the sixth and seventh sections, respectively, discuss its natural history and offer a curiously added coda that compares the Eiffel Tower's design properties with the oak's, proclaiming the latter the more superior.

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