Check out my review at:
http://www.shannonsbookbag.blogspot.com/2012/09/cabin-ureneck.html ( )

The true subject of this book, two brothers and their relationship to each other, the world, and their own mortality, isn't assisted by the cabin metaphor/framing device. ( )

It’s part story and part encyclopedia. It's a compilation of everything related to the location and construction of a cabin in Maine, though it's by no means a how-to manual. Half of it is about the human relationships of the builders — which is my sweet spot. The other half, intertwined with the story, is about the ecology, history, and social structure of the area, sometimes in exhaustive detail. If the subject of a particular page doesn’t interest you, just skip ahead a few paragraphs or pages and read about something else. Like:
"By the 1830s, Stoneham (Maine) was … a source of staves for the manufacture of wood barrels. Stoneham’s staves, the beveled pieces of wood that formed the sides of the barrels, traveled by wagon to Portland and then by schooner to Cuba and the West Indies, where they were assembled into barrels and filled with molasses and rum. The staves were temporarily assembled into barrels in Stoneham to assure their eventual watertightness, and then broken down and packaged into shooks that took up less space in shipping — in the local vernacular, the staves were 'all shook up.'"
Did Elvis Presley know that when he recorded the song? Well, now you and I know it.

I must have skipped a third of the text, but the parts that engaged me were wonderful. I loved the author's boyhood trapping of muskrats in New Jersey (and what does this have to do with building a cabin in Maine? Not much.) I loved the Civil War history detailing what happened to the local Maine boys who went away to fight. I loved meeting the locals who helped with the construction — a carpenter, a dowser, an excavator — and I loved meeting a crusty local lumberman who greeted the author with a long skeptical stare and then asked, "Are you a liberal?" as if he were asking, "Are you a cockroach?"

It's about men: the author, his brother Paul, their sons, their father. Both the author and his brother go through divorces, but though he examines every other tangential aspect of the cabin-building, we learn almost nothing about the break-ups except how they affected the work. The very lack of women in the author's narrative — and I suppose, the author's mind — might indicate why the divorces took place. Or might not. I have to respect the author's discretion, though it creates a notable hole in the story.

Here's a construction detail I learned, while it twisted my stomach in a knot:
"Paul smacked his thumbnail hard with the hammer. It immediately turned purple and throbbed as the blood from the bruise pushed up the nail. He applied pressure on it to slow the pooling of the blood, but the pain was bad enough to make working difficult… So I proposed a solution I had learned on a construction job and had once used on myself: Piercing the thumbnail to relieve the pressure… I sterilized a tiny drill bit with the flame of a butane lighter and went to work in my operating room — the front seat of his truck. Slowly and carefully, I turned a tiny drill bit, about an eighth of an inch in diameter, back and forth with my thumb and forefinger over Paul's thumbnail to make a hole. 'You're going to know it when I touch the flesh,' I told him. 'That's okay,' he said. 'It can't be any worse than what I'm feeling right now.' The bit came through and the pressurized blood shot over the dashboard and onto the windshield. He wrapped his thumb with a handkerchief and tied it tight."
I hope I never have to use this technique, but it's good to know. ( )

This book is kind of a winter counterpart for summer's beach book, an easy and interesting book to be enjoyed as the days grow shorter and colder. It's a book for winter dreaming. For me the book's cover photo of the actual cabin evokes the mood perfectly.

A short summary of the plot is contained in the book's subtitle. The author finds himself in his fifties battling depression and heart problems after a decade of divorce, job loss and the death of his mother. He decides he and his brother will construct a cabin, because he likes a project and he likes the idea of a family place. So he buys, almost on a whim, five acres in rural Maine.

The author is a former journalist and current journalism professor, so it's a well-written book. I think anyone who has read Thoreau can see the appeal of the idea of a cabin in rural Maine. However, the book itself is not really a straight-forward account of the cabin construction. It explores at length the parts of the author's personal history that make him want to build the cabin in the first place. In addition, he wants the book to be a paean to nature and the outdoors. He loves to discuss local history and provide quick sketches of some of his new Maine neighbors. Some of the digressions are better than others, but even in the slower parts the next episode arrives quickly enough to carry the reader happily forward.

It is a bit of a meandering journey, but it's pleasant and interesting in the hands of this author. ( )