»One Good Turn

One Good Turn, Witold Rybczynski's latest essay, describes the quiet and beautiful history of the screwdriver. Perhaps it is Rybczynski's writing itself that is quiet and beautiful: he uses lucid, descriptive phrases to draw out the historical and social elements of the screw itself, and supposes the existence of the machine necessary to work it. Historical evidence, in writing and in archaeology, proves surprisingly scarce for the device, and no reliable mention appears until a few hundred years ago.
Rybczynski is one of my favourite writers: he chooses his subjects carefully and writes extremely well. His vocabulary and sentence-formation are superlative.