A World Across its Surface: The Story of the Fiddle

This nonfiction narrative traces the fiddle from its European origins to its American incarnation as a folk instrument, blending history with the personal stories of fiddle makers and players. The centerpiece around which a varied cast of luthiers and musicians shifts, the instrument itself is the main character of the narrative. As the work unfolds, various facets of the fiddle's identity are explored, revealing a riddle of instrument—a creation whose beauty confounds, and whose anatomy contradicts physics and geometry, science and sense. More than anything else, perhaps, this narrative, in the end, is an attempt at penetrating the mystery of an elusive instrument.