By Magdalena Hernandez

"Plastics."

In the 1967 film The Graduate, young college grad Benjamin Braddock receives this one-word piece of career advice. Back then, the road to success seemed paved with polyethylene. Light, cheap, strong, and malleable, plastic in its various forms was being used for everything from cookware to clothing.

Forty years hence, our enthusiasm for plastic has waned a bit. We know now about the costs its manufacture and disposal can exact on our health and our environment.

There's an aesthetic price as well. Plastic frequently stands in for metal and wood in household and office objects. Yet, as Northeastern history professor Harvey Green points out, "if all this new stuff is so great, why is so much of it molded and colored to look like wood?" (italics his).

In an ambitious new book, Wood: Craft, Culture, History, Green takes a wide-angle look through the lenses of history, culture, art, and science at what may be man's most-loved material. Despite encroachment on its turf by synthetic upstarts, wood "persists not just for reasons of utility and convenience but for its affective—even romantic—presence," Green maintains.

Divided into thematic chapters—such as "Shelter," "Bat and Battle," "Fire, Smoke, and the Costs of Comfort"—Wood resembles other recent histories that seek a larger picture of the world by focusing intently on an everyday item, like salt or blue jeans. As Green reminds us, wood has been part of nearly every facet of human experience, hewn and hammered into pianos and ships, desks and matchsticks.

At the most primal level, firewood was for centuries the principal means of warming houses and cooking food. As recently as 1850, wood provided more than 90 percent of the energy in the United States. But it was also outfitting the Industrial Revolution; most machines were originally made, at least in part, from wood.

A practiced woodworker himself, Green in the book's early sections expertly discusses trees and the tools that fell and shape them. He describes the physical and visual characteristics of different woods to show why one is prized over others for a specific function. Wooden buildings, from log cabins to stave churches, are likewise examined, with the author explaining the difficulties involved in joining wood.

Surprisingly, the book devotes only a handful of pages to furniture. Although Green quickly covers the basics of history and design, he is more interested in furniture's cultural significance. For instance, how sitting in a chair was for many early societies a marker of class. And how the neoclassical designs so popular in early-nineteenth-century American furniture were meant to visually link the young republic to the ancient seats of democracy.

Moving from parlor to sea, Green reminds us that wooden ships and barrels allowed communities to connect and share products: "Sound watercraft carried people and goods over the water without losing them to the deep; barrels preserved the food and drink that were essential to long-haul seaborne travel on the open seas. Together they were the engine of exploration and empire."

In fact, an entire chapter is devoted to "The Empire of Wood," covering wood's role in pre-twentieth-century imperialism. From the use of pine pitch as a boat sealant, to peasant rebellions against landowners who outlawed the theft of wood—which the lower classes desperately needed for cooking and heating—Green explores the astonishing number of ways in which wood has influenced the fate of nations.

Including the United States. Americans may not reenact a Boston Wood Party, but timber was the cause of countless clashes between the colonists and Mother England. "As early as 1691," Green tells us, "the Crown acted to take possession of all trees suitable for masts by including a clause in the Massachusetts Bay Charter that reserved them for its use." The author has already explained why: "Navies made empires, and wood made navies."

And navies required a lot of wood. Building just one seventy-four-cannon warship in the eighteenth century devoured something like fifty or sixty acres of forest, writes Green.

Overall, the breadth and scope of the book's attention to all things wood are appropriately dizzying. Occasionally, though, a reader may wish a particular fact or two had been left on the cutting-room floor.

For instance, when discussing the use of wood smoke for meat preservation—especially crucial in pre-refrigeration eras—Green notes that, in the American South, slaves who knew how to smoke meat were valued above field hands, an interesting bit of information. But the further observation that rebellious slaves sometimes stole meat from smokers adds little value. And some of the detail in the chapter called "Little Things with a Point"—which discusses, among other items, butter molds, Popsicle sticks, and golf tees—seems, well, pointless.

Yet when explaining wood's connections to class and status, a repeated theme, the author is always fresh and revealing. For example, his explication of the origin of the word sabotage: The wooden shoes that French peasants wore, sabots, made a clatter described by the verb saboter. Thanks to less-than-generous class associations, Green writes, saboter began to mean "treachery" and "disruption" in the minds of the upper crust, who, not coincidentally, glided around on leather soles.

Today, of course, wood is prized by the well-to-do"in the architecture of their homes, even as a material for their children's toys, a notion perhaps born of a "nostalgia for a past that may not have existed," Green writes.

Such insights, interspersed throughout the wealth of facts and anecdotes, make this volume a natural for anyone interested in readable cultural histories. Woodworkers also will appreciate the encyclopedic detail on their medium. And environmentalists will value the alarms Green implicitly"and occasionally explicitly"sounds against the overharvesting of trees.

By turns lovely, dark, and deep, Wood both celebrates our ability to harness nature to our needs and warns us to respect the relationship. Plastics may not be our best route to a satisfying future.

Magdalena Hernandez, MBA'02, is a senior editor.

The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer, by Michael Meltsner; University of Virginia Press; 2006

School of Law professor Michael Meltsner cut his legal teeth during the Civil Rights movement. A white Yale law grad, he worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, alongside legends like Thurgood Marshall.

Meltsner argued his share of notable cases, for Muhammad Ali, in his bid to get his boxer's license restored by New York State, medical personnel fighting Jim Crow in U.S. hospitals, and death-row inmates.

An enthralling insider's perspective on public-service law, the book will appeal to legal eagles, would-be lawyers, civil rights advocates, and anyone interested in the fight for social justice.

Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves, by Arnold Arluke; Temple University Press; 2006

Cruelty to animals often elicits our most impassioned outrage. We're astonished and repelled by accounts of defenseless creatures being harmed.

In this work, sociology professor Arnold Arluke explores the dark side of the human-animal bond through research and interviews with more than 250 people, ranging from teenage animal abusers, to animal "hoarders," to law enforcement officials and shelter workers.

Only by understanding different groups' behaviors and motivations, Arluke argues, can we formulate effective policies to combat abuse. The book looks at what cruelty is, how it affects us, and how we should think about it and study it.