How to Build Impossible Things

Reviews

Who knew Mark Ellison’s handiwork would include a book this exquisite, purposeful, absorbing? How To Build Impossible Things merits reading and rereading — it’s a book with much to teach us all. Mark Ellison is known for building beautiful rooms, but here he has crafted a gorgeous book. This cross between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Kitchen Confidential contains fascinating insights about working with your hands, the nature of talent, and how to create a meaningful life, whatever your craft is. Oh, and lots of juicy stories of pain-in-the-ass clients. Even if you aren’t handy — I can barely hang a picture frame — you’ll find this book a wonderful read Sturdy advice, delivered with humour and the occasional splinter Wry, laconic and packed with salient life lessons, this is a book that will encourage everyone to attempt to build the life they wish to live Like sitting in a room with Mark and hearing the best stories in the world, wound up with wisdom, craft, and hard-won philosophy A brilliantly engaging storyteller, laugh-out-loud funny, loving, cheekily smug . . . An enjoyable read on making, inventing and what might contribute to a life worth living Mark is an amazing polymath - and an Olympic-level aesthete. Unlike many polymaths and aesthetes, though, when he gets up in the morning, it's to make real, physical things - including this book On a job site Mark makes irreverent banter while scribbling measurements on the back of pizza box as works of astonishing complexity and precision materializes under his direction. Now he has somehow applied this same deceptively offhand but exacting craft to unspooling this collection of tales from his ascent to the summit of one of the most demanding construction habitats on earth Expand reviews