Books of the Year 2013, The Times Literary Supplement (UK) —“…a remarkable, beautifully written book.”

6 Top Non-Fiction Books for Your 2014 Reading List… the best of 2013, Suzanne McGee, The Fiscal Times (USA) — “If you’re interested in history, in historical artifacts, or just in creativity, you need to read this.”

Best Books of 2012, The New Republic (USA) — “A beautifully written account of craft and inspiration.”

“The Lost Carving is a compelling personal story, but it is also a meditation on making, on imitation and illusion, technique and genius, and on the strange physical and mental immersion that enables the transmission of vision from brain to hand, tool to wood. Gibbons stalks the book, but so do David Esterly’s intellectual and poetic mentors, Yeats and Plotinus, whom he echoes in his use of sensory metaphors, and “his sudden flashes of vision – the sense of great doors suddenly flung open”. This is an illuminating and exhilarating book, as intricate and wonderfully engaging as the carvings that lie at its heart.”
—Jenny Uglow, Times Literary Supplement

“This is a strange and wonderful book, simultaneously a meditation on the nature of making and a reflection on time. It is riveting.”
—Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

“David Esterly’s memoir is a beautiful, intricate mediation on creativity and discovery, on fire and rebirth, on culture and history. Truly, this is a story to be pored over with love and admiration.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray Love and Committed

“This is a beautiful and remarkable book. David Esterly is a rare bird. First and foremost, he is an artist and a craftsman. A virtuoso carver of wood, he makes objects of sublime beauty and accomplishment that enchant and amaze. He is also a gifted scholar. As a maker, he practices a tradition that operates, as he puts it “near the bedrock” of human cultural activity. His own story is woven through with fascinating insights into this tradition and the towering influences on his own practice. And he is a gifted writer. With the literary sensibilities of a poet, he describes how he came late upon his passion for carving and how the objects he makes take shape from the vibrant relationships between the wood, his tools and his own creative energies. Esterly writes in the same way that he carves – with a nuanced feel for structure and form, a revealing use of metaphor and an incisive sense of style. Part cultural history, part detective story and part memoir, The Lost Carving will enlighten and delight anyone with a real interest in creativity, aesthetics and the human spirit.”
—Sir Ken Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of The Element

“Every now and then there comes along a memoir that stands out for its beauty, its ability to charm, and its insights into a life given over to art. This lovely book about woodcarving is just such a work. Entrancing.”—Alexander McCall Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection

“A gripping account of the political maneuverings involved in a major restoration project and an intimate meditation on the nature and meaning of carving…Its heart lies in Esterly’s moving ruminations about the spiritual value inherent in fine craftsmanship and technique…Photos of Gibbons’ magnificent works enhance this romantic, lyrical prose portrait of ‘making and seeing…entwined together.’”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Tracking the ups and downs of the project while contemplating the nature of art, rediscovering the intricacies of his chosen discipline, and exploring the process of creating, Esterly has created a work that is part philosophic memoir and part treatise on true craftsmanship…often his words take on the imagery and rhythm of verse…As intricate as his carvings, Esterly has shaped a story that captures the effort and uncertainty that lies behind the creation of art and beauty.”
—Publishers Weekly

“…Esterly’s masterfully witty and nuanced prose makes it clear his writing prowess is at least on par with his woodworking skills.”
—Carl Hays, Booklist

“(P)rofound and wondrous… a book rich in thought and lovely in style… Esterly is that uncommon thing, a visual artist who can coax as much beauty from words as he can from his primary medium….No doubt the artists (and aspiring artists) who will embrace this book, passing it on with fervent recommendations and christening it as the classic it deserves to be, will find as much learn from his example as from his advice.”
—Laura Miller, Salon

“(W)hile reading David Esterly’s gorgeous new book, ”The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making,” I found myself …. copying passages longhand with my favorite pen onto actual paper. Such is the book’s power that for a mad moment, I convinced myself I absolutely needed to learn calligraphy to make a worthy copy of Esterly’s lines…. It is impossible to categorize ”The Lost Carving.” It is a memoir of the year Esterly spent restoring and replacing fire-damaged carvings by Gibbons in Hampton Court Palace (the ”lost carving” of the title); it is an intricate description of the process — mental and physical — of woodcarving. It is a historical puzzler, a meditation on meaning, even a bit of a commonplace book as Esterly quotes liberally from Yeats and Blake. And it is, implicitly and explicitly, a critique of the current artistic ethic that since ”art is ideas,” hiring someone else to do the actual making preserves the artist’s ”purity.” But none of these depictions do justice to ”The Lost Carving.” Above all, it is a work of beauty….sublimely crafted.”
—Patricia Hagen, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“David Esterly’s memoir, ”The Lost Carving,” is ostensibly about woodcarving, but there is more to it than that. There are precedents, of course: Robert M. Pirsig’s ”Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1974) called itself ”An Inquiry into Values,” and the more recent ”Shop Class as Soulcraft” (2009) by Matthew B. Crawford was subtitled ”An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.” Esterly’s book is, besides its main topic, a ”Journey to the Heart of Making.” Inquiry or journey: What’s the difference? For the most part, pretensions: Esterly doesn’t have any. He’s not trying to convince the reader of anything (though the reader may end up convinced); he’s simply trying to understand his own path from English lit graduate student to master practitioner of hight-relief, naturalistic woodcarving… ”The Lost Carving’’ is …. an exploration of the ways in which great art can enrich our lives in the most tangible ways. This is a serious, beautiful book about craftsmanship written not by a frustrated philosopher but, as Esterly proudly describes himself, by “a dirty monk with a vision.”
—Buzzy Jackson, The Boston Globe

“(B)eautifully written and hauntingly evocative, a graceful meditation on art and craft…and the ties that bind us to the past.”
—Maclean’s

“(P)art memoir, part thriller, part travelogue, and part meditation on the art of carving…Esterly writes, as well as carves, like a poet.”
– Piers Plowright, Camden Review

“’Making’ is the word in Mr. Esterly’s title, and it is the nub of his book. He is in love with the physicality of his art, the flowing together of hand and brain, of chisel and creativity…. ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ he quotes, from W.B. Yeats — one poet among many to whom he turns to express his sense of artistic oneness. Alongside the poets, there stalks through this book the ghost of Gibbons himself, whose mind and hands become Mr. Esterly’s obsession, his inspiration and his burden. In the end through, the work is the thing, and the photographs of Mr Esterly’s astonishing carvings speak for themselves.”
– The Economist

“(T)he memoir is as artful a piece of work in some ways as the carving…a lone artist…fighting against the force of bureaucracy…”
–Rana Mitter, BBC Radio 3

“The account of his Hampton Court venture is so wonderfully limpid and so informed by wide-ranging scholarship that we receive an insight into the creative process.”
– Simon Hughes, Financial Review

“(A) profoundly passionate, insightful and special book written by a woodcarver, poet and philosopher; simultaneously a reflective memoir and an absorbing contemplation of the artisan’s creative process…As readers we feel as though we are engaging with the private journal of an intense and poetic man…”
– Jasmine Jean, arts Hub

“One could frankly not care less about carving and still be absolutely in thrall to the lushness of Esterly’s language, his passion for creation, his reverence for the physical act of work… His is a hungry mind, an open heart, and a searching eye – and, again, the guy knows how to turn a phase… Ultimately, and at its core, Esterly’s memoir is a meditation: on labor, on effort, on the search for meaning, on beauty, on the choices we make in life and in art that shape what we do and who we become. And Esterly does it without a trace of pretension or self-importance… (He) is as much an original as his intricate carvings, and his book is one to savor.”
– Rita Giordano, Philadelphia Inquirer

“I really do think that when a book written by a carver of wood makes a teacher of writing say, ‘This is about the art of writing,’ and a medical doctor say, ‘This is about the craft of doctoring,’ the author has gotten close to the heart of poiesis, of making, has reached that exalted state where folks from different spheres of interest feel that the author is talking straight to them.”
— Francis A. Neelon, The Pharos (Journal of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society)