After writing a long review of this book that was eaten up by the ether :( here is a summary:
while the premise of the book is a good one, Sennett does himself a huge dis-service by writing a lumpen and muddled ramble about Craftsmanship, never seeming to get to a point that is of real interest or importance. Littered with strawmen and tangential connections that don't quite work. I really wanted to like this book but have come away disappointed with the finished product. ( )

Philosopher writes about how doing things with one’s hands is important to thinking. I ordered this because I’m interested in things like the art v. craft dichotomy, but I ended up uninterested, and the nods to gender and race dynamics did not correct the universalization of the Western white male experience. A parenthetical from the prologue: “Man does not, clearly, mean just men. … I’ll try to make clear when man refers generically to human beings and when it applies only to males.” Yeah, not so much: that “clearly” (and its placement) is telling. Later, Sennett posits a distinction between replicants and robots, the former of which substitute for humans and the latter of which are better than us at something. Now watch: “The perfect women created in Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives are also replicants. … All these artifices mirror us by mimicking us.” Hmm—I thought the point of the Stepford Wives was that real women were irritatingly not “perfect” from the male perspective. The false universalization leads his analysis to be confused about what counts as “mimicking” and what counts as human attributes. ( )

Reading this book was frustrating. Richard Sennett's prose, and the examples he gives of craftsmanship and how it grows, and what it means as part of a life well lived, are satisfying. But this book is so badly proofread, so full of typographical errors, that I started to suspect these had been deliberately introduced to show what a miserable world we would live in if people (like publishers) did not take any pride in their work. I have never read a book (or bought one!) with more errors. Does this matter? It was mentioned in a couple of the newspaper reviews but mostly glossed over in the praise of the ideas. Surely in this of all books, the physical manifestation should have been held to a higher standard. ( )

wonderful - transforming ( )