Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford (New York: Penguin, 2009). Contents: A brief case for the useful arts — The separation of thinking from doing — To be master of one’s own stuff — The education of a gearhead — The further education of a gearhead : from amateur to professional — The contradictions of the cubicle — Thinking as doing — Work, leisure, and full engagement.
I’m a sucker for any book that has to do in some way, even tangentially, with motorcycling. This one has the picture of a vintage BMW on the cover, so I fell for it. And I sort of liked the book. It contains the extended reflections of a University of Chicago PhD in political philosophy who went on to set up shop fixing motorcycles in Virginia. So it is no surprise it waxes philosophical, in particular on the satisfactions of manual labor, in contrast to the emptiness of the work he did first as the writer of professional journal article abstracts and then as the director of a Washington, D.C. think tank.