One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw by Witold
Rybczynski, Simon and Schuster, £9.99, ISBN 0743208498
IT’S a rare book that blends scholarship, authority and enthusiasm. Yet
Witold Rybczynski manages to do just that in One Good Turn. The
subject? The history of the screw and the screwdriver.
Rybczynski does show something of the enthusiasm and idiosyncrasy of the
curious Victorian naturalist in his book, a quality often absent from scholarly
monographs. His book began when he was commissioned by The New York
Times to write an essay on the most useful common tool of…
