About the Author:

Historian Anne L. Macdonald, the former head of the History Department at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. is also the author of Feminine Ingenuity: Women and Invention in America (1994) and Perrot: The Story of a Library (2006).

About the Narrator:

Kymberly Dakin won the 2006 Audie Award for her narration of Alice Munro’s Runaway.

No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting

By Anne L. Macdonald
Read by Kymberly Dakin
Audiobook abridged
4 CDs,

$ 29.95
ships only to US and Canada

About the Book:

Drawn from diaries, letters and personal reminiscences, No Idle Hands tells an intimate and sometimes hair-raising story of hand knitting in America from Colonial times onward. Women knit through the hardships of covered wagon travel across the West. They knit to save their husbands and sons from freezing to death on battlefields. Shell-shocked men knit to save their sanity in hospitals during both world wars. No Idle Hands documents the importance knitting has had in American life.