Book Review: When a Woman Takes an Ax to a Wall
Author: Allegra Bennett
Date: 2002
Publisher: Renovating Woman Books
ISBN: 0-9656173-2-7
Length: 126 pages
Illustrations: some black and white photos and graphics
Quote: “The task at hand often serves double duty as an unexpected but inevitable meditation zone.”
When a Woman Takes an Ax to a Wall...Where Is She Really Trying to Go?, asks the subtitle. The book answers the question. This is a book about women who have found home improvement jobs to be a path to personal growth.
Several of these women discovered their talents for home improvement work after losing the men in their lives. Although some of them work with male colleagues, the stories they share are not about working with men as partners. I suspect that this was a deliberate choice. Working with a partner is fun, but this book was meant to encourage women to start working all on their own.
Another deliberate choice was to broaden the geographical scope of the book beyond its local interest market. Allegra Bennett had been writing for Baltimore newspapers about the ongoing and badly needed renovation of certain infamous sections of Baltimore. (I hope the one in which people driving up Route 1 from Washington always get lost was the worst. I hope it’s been improved since the last time I saw it.) Most of the stories women shared with her for this book are about either Baltimore or Washington, D.C., but a decision was made to include stories from Michigan, Georgia, and California too.
Most of the stories in this book aren’t about practical details of home improvement, although Bennett shares a cheerfully vindictive story about a divorcee whose intuitive guess about how to fix the garbage disposal turned out to be better than her ex-husband’s. If your garbage disposal or other appliances back up, this story alone would have been worth the $12.95 this book originally cost. We had replaced an “Insinkerator” with a “Badger” at considerable expense; we never had a real problem with the Badger but after reading this book I’ve wondered whether Bennett’s insight might have saved the Insinkerator, and of course saved us a few hundred dollars.
The book also includes one contemporary and one historic ghost story, and, in case any readers feel that they’ve bought or inherited a haunted house, a recipe for ghost-banishing floor wash. Don’t laugh, skeptics. As a long run of wet summers has created a plague of mold in my home town, I’ve noticed that, whenever my Highly Sensory-Perceptive nose detects the presence of black mold in a house, certain people who do and don’t believe in ghosts report feeling that “something doesn’t want me to be there” or “I have to get out of that house.” Scrubbing walls and floors definitely provides fast temporary relief, in all cases, and the recipe in this book sounds less toxic than chlorine bleach. I’d like to know more about efun, “a chalklike substance that dissolves in liquid,” to understand the physical and chemical effects this treatment would have on mold generally and Stachybotrys atra in particular. Well, of course, to find out about the efun and the precise method for making and using the floor wash, you have to consult an expert on Yoruba folklore. In Washington and Baltimore there are several of those.
But mostly this is a book of inspirational stories for women who find themselves needing to tackle “a man’s job” in their own house. It’s particularly recommended to women doing home improvement in Washington, Baltimore, or suburban Maryland, because it contains the stories and real names of neighbors who’ve gone professional or semi-professional.
This review was written several years ago but left on hold because the book was too new to be offered as a Fair Trade Book, too old to be touted as a New Book. Now it's been out long enough to be a Fair Trade Book. When you buy it from this web site, for $10 per book (it's semi-rare!) plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment, we'll send $1.50 to Allegra Bennett or a charity of her choice. At least seven more books of this size would fit into one package, and they might be offered as Fair Trade Books too...feel free to browse!
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