About this item
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways-as keel, lodgepole, and execution site-and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. In this book Matthew Battles follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.
About the Author
As a twelve year old, Matthew Battles accidentally threw a baseball through the window of the public library in Petersburg, Illinois; he's been paying for it ever since. His first book, Library: An Unquiet History, appeared in 2004. He has written about language, culture, nature, technology, and history for the American Scholar, the Atlantic Online, the Boston Globe, and the Wilson Quarterly, among other publications. He is editor and lead writer at Gearfuse.com, a blog covering science, technology, and culture. He also blogs at HiLobrow.com, and is at work on a book about the sentimental and natural history of handwriting. On Twitter, he's @matthewbattles.
