Reminiscent of James Herriot's All Creature's Great and Small, Don Metz's Confessions describe the life of a domestic country architect with warm wry humor and often slapstick pathos.

Metz describes learning the harrowing ABCs of "a weapons-grade jackhammer", the "precise choreographies" of a majestic D-8 Caterpillar, and the euphoria induced whilst performing acrobatic feats of carpentry on rickety ladders.

He is asked to build one house entirely held together with adhesives, "No bolts, no screws, no hangers: just sticky stuff"; and another for a woman, allergic to wood, plaster, concrete, stone, brick, metal, ragweed and glass. Clients, who are adorably unable to read drawings, request bomb-proof roofs, or impossibly sustainable, super-green, eco-structures. Each incident is a challenge, a problem-solving limbo from which he somehow must escape at the end of each chapter.

A Yale-trained, award-winning architect, and pioneer in earth-sheltered housing and sustainable design, Don Metz has written six other books including two novels. He lives in Lyme, NH.