Listening to Trees

George Nakashima, Woodworker

words by Holly Thompson
pictures by Toshiki Nakamura

Review posted February 4, 2025.
Neal Porter Books (Holiday House), 2024. 48 pages.
Review written January 29, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review

Listening to Trees is a picture book biography of American George Nakashima. He was of Japanese descent, and his family was imprisoned during World War II because of that, but the focus of this book is his approach to working with wood, bringing out the beauty of the trees themselves.

The story is told in haibun, and explanations at the back tell us that this is a combination of haiku and prose. So it's more deliberate than the fact that there's a haiku on each spread.

The book covers his learning years traveling around the world as an architect and then even learning more about Japanese furniture-making techniques from a carpenter in the prison camp. Then it shows how he developed a style that used the shape of the wood and the patterns in the grain to decide what to make, culminating in giant Peace Tables for each continent of the world.

Back matter gives a timeline of his life as well as an explanation of what goes into the process of woodworking, and finally a spread of beautiful photographs of his work. The pictures throughout the book make me want to run my hands along the wood. And that's starting from a place of never having heard of this artist before.