broadax

With Broadax and Firebrand--The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

You can still see the cut marks made by the broadax and adzes, hand tools that required a strong back and would guarantee a healthy appetite, too.

If you don't believe it, take a broadax and try it.

The failure of this book, which promises to rise occasionally to the level of the very good (when it desperately needs to be great), is that by the end we know no more about Bateman's need to dismember others that we know about the inner workings in the mind of a wooden-faced actor who swings a broadax in an exploitation film.

This half-millennium offers a vantage point for Cuban environmental historian Reinaldo Funes Monzote's From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba (originally published in Spanish in 2004) to contemplate the fate of Cuba's forests, largely felled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in much the same way the late Warren Dean's Brazilian eco-history Broadax and Firebrand surveyed the destruction of the Mata Atlantica since 1500, when Portuguese cut down a tree to build a cross signifying possession.

Reviewing the Deutsche Philharmonie concert at Mechanics Hall in 2005, Telegram & Gazette reviewer John Zeugner observed, "Conductor Theodore Kuchar has an arresting style, wielding his baton sometimes like a rapier, sometimes like a broadax with both hands gripping the wand; at crescendo moments he arched back then snapped his body forward as if to punch the massive chords out of his musicians."

Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Massive 40-foot beams for the structure were hand-hewn from logs with a broadax.

Turner struck the first blow with the hatchet, and a broadax wielded by the hand of a raiding party member finished the deed.

With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press)