Expanded text of an article in Pipes and Tobaccos Magazine (Summer 2006) by Thomas Looker.  Sections not originally published in the magazine are marked "new."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

All contents © 2006 by Thomas Looker.
Please do not quote or reproduce without permission of the author.

Thomas Looker is currently Visiting Scholar in American Studies at Amherst College, where he has taught for twenty years. He is the author of The Sound and the Story, NPR and the Art of Radio and the producer of the public radio series, New England Almanac: Portraits in Sound of New England Life and Landscape, for which he won a Peabody Award. As a writer and a teacher, Looker probes the singular importance of the human imagination in shaping our understanding of the world. Recently, he has been focusing his attention on the unique creativity expressed in the briar carvings of master pipe-makers around the world.