When a master craftsman dies three days before finishing his last cabinet, he leaves behind more than an empty workshop. In this searing meditation on authenticity in modern America, a son inherits his father's tools, his unfinished work, and the weight of what's real in an increasingly artificial world.

From a union hall's demolition to the circus of presidential campaigns, from German drawer pulls that never found their home to AI programs generating "authentic" experiences, THE UNFINISHED CABINET weaves a masterful narrative about what we lose when we polish away our rough edges. At its heart stands a single piece of furniture: a cabinet with perfect joints and missing drawers, waiting in a Queens workshop while the world around it turns hardware stores into coffee shops and union halls into luxury condos.

Part memoir, part political commentary, part craftsmanship manifesto, this debut work asks: What happens to truth when everything becomes content? What remains authentic when even authenticity gets focus-grouped? Through nine interconnected essays that move from sawdust to social media, from wooden joints to political movements, the author discovers that his father's final unfinished project might hold the blueprint for understanding our current moment.

Raw, precise, and powerfully observed, THE UNFINISHED CABINET reads like a master class in both woodworking and truth-telling. For readers of Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, Rebecca Solnit's cultural criticism, and anyone who has ever inherited an unfinished task.