White Pine
American History and the Tree that Made a Nation

I liked how the book started, with the relationship of white pine to European settlements in the Americas. The second half of the book took unexpected jumps through history. Overall, it was a generally interesting, though cursory overview. I'd rather it had been a whole book about the role of pine i......more

To be fair, I did find this book informative and interesting. But I really struggle with nonfiction as it doesn’t hold my attention as well as novels do, so I didn’t get a chance to finish this before returning it; I only got halfway through. Still, I found the information surrounding the white pine......more

Not very interesting. The first half is a history of colonial america, mostly focusing on pines, but without any sense of narrative structure or cadence. The second half is bizarre. A chapter on Hancock lumber that reads like marketing copy, for instance. Didn't get a real sense of the purpose of th......more

A solid book that outlines the impact of one tree on American history. Although a good book in general, I would have like to have known more about how this tree affected the manufacturing of paper—a topic hinted at but not described in a later chapter, and the ending sort of fizzles out without a cl......more