Like sitting in a room with Mark and hearing the best stories in the world, wound up with wisdom, craft, and hard-won philosophy -- Burkhard Bilger - The New Yorker

A brilliantly engaging storyteller, laugh-out-loud funny, loving, cheekily smug . . . An enjoyable read on making, inventing and what might contribute to a life worth living -- Julie Mehretu

Mark is an amazing polymath - and an Olympic-level aesthete. Unlike many polymaths and aesthetes, though, when he gets up in the morning, it's to make real, physical things - including this book -- Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director, Google NYC

On a job site Mark makes irreverent banter while scribbling measurements on the back of pizza box as works of astonishing complexity and precision materializes under his direction. Now he has somehow applied this same deceptively offhand but exacting craft to unspooling this collection of tales from his ascent to the summit of one of the most demanding construction habitats on earth -- David Hotson, architect, Skyhouse and Pinnacle

Mark Ellison is regarded by many as the best carpenter in New York. A man with an affinity for challenging work, he has designed and constructed some of New York's most elaborate and expensive homes, and been profiled in the New Yorker. But, as a native of the old steel town Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his route into the building trade and the mastery of a craft was unexpected, moving from construction labourer to helper and finally to carpenter. Now, at the age of sixty, he has written his first book.