Customer Reviews

The Craftsman

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While I found the contents of Sennett's book interesting and even, at times, uniquely thought-provoking, reading the book left me bewildered and dismayed: How could a book extolling the virtues of quality in craftsmanship be so poorly edited? Is the manner in which the book is published a purposeful counterpoint to Sennett's basic argument? Without exaggeration, almost every page in the book held one or more instances of unaddressed typographical oversight. In truth, the book read like a poor translation from another language possessing idioms and phraseology totally foreign to English. If this is the best that Yale University Press can do, I will certainly question any future purchases bearing that name. For the prospective buyer, be prepared for a disruptive read.

You name it; Richard Sennett breaks it down. Metamorphosis provoking material consciousness? (three ways: internal evolution of a type-form, judgment about mixture and synthesis, domain shift). Mirror tools? (two types: replicant and robot). Sennett combines this penchant for analytic break-down with a treasure trove of stories, examples, and experiences, drilling into craft through the finger movements of pianists, the methodology of cookbook Instructions, and much, much more. The Craftsman isn't proof as much as exploration, the perfect platform for a widely read and experienced scholar to play with a vast and varied data set. Even with all that information, The Craftsman comes down to a belief: that craft isn't about things but about values, not about superior skill but about doing a job well for its own sake. Think of it as a theory of sustainable labor in the age of hyper-capitalism.

My BIG GRIPE with this book is that if Richard Sennett believes so much in craftsmanship, why are there so many typos? DOZENS OF TYPOS. Misspellings. Extra words. Here's the end of the second to the last sentence in the book: "the denouement of this narrative is often marked by marked by bitterness and regret." Ya think? If this book was a car, the dealer would be forced by law to replace it. I'm sure Sennett had nothing to do with this, and that he is mortified that his faith in the practice of craft (proofreading, book-making) has been so blatantly betrayed by his publisher (Yale University Press, of the billions in endowment fame), but frankly, reading this book was to experience cynicism of the highest order: A terrible fate for a story so indebted to a job well done.

Richard Sennett (professor of sociology at New York University and at The London School of Economics) is vitally concerned with the devaluation of human values within the context of the new economy.

We live in an age where management decisions can be very remote, and where people's jobs are displaced wholesale, moved offshore, and where human lives are measured by the bottom-line accounting of large organisations.

What Sennett does is put a stake in the ground by asking rhetorically whether our commitment to work - our craftsmanship - is merely about money, or about something deeper and more human. Of course, the answer is that work commitment - the skill, the care, the late nights, the problem solving and pride that go into our work is a LOT more than about money.

In this book Sennett very clearly and thoughtfully dicusses the vital social currency of craftsmanship (and he uses the term in a modern sense - software programmers are craftspeople too.)

The book is timely, especially in a donwturn economy, and it raises many questions about how we value the people in our society. Craftspeople have been devalued of late - how we celebrate the CEO titans! - but maybe the pendulum needs to swing back the other way.

A worthwhile read for managers, for HR people, for craftspeople of all stripes - and for policy makers and economists. If our society is supposed to be more value-based these days (good corporate citizens, good global citizens) then The Craftsman urges us to look closer to home: at our own good people. Well recommended.

See also:
1 The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism
2 Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization
3 The Fall of Public Man (Open Market Edition)

This was a very good, very flawed book. Sennet's ideas are extremely interesting but he is an deplorable writer. He rambles and mixes metaphors regularly, uses obscure anglicisms and archaisms and odd syntax with dismaying frequency. George Orwell he is not. He sites Hannah Arendt as one of his influences, and I seem to recall she was not the most readable writer either.

Amusingly, he mentions that a work of handicraft should be rough, handmade looking... and his prose is all that! It seems to have been written on a tape recorder. He thanks his manuscript editor in the foreword, he should have fired her, there are sentences that make no sense at all, misspellings, and double entendres.
Maybe he did some of this on purpose, like modern art, so the reader would have to slow down and parse every sentence, who knows? He's like an prophet, he needs someone to interpret him in a more accessible way.

Anyway, I loved his ideas, and think this was a very meaningful book for me personally.

There is quite a bit of sociological theory in this book, but that's been discussed by other reviewers, so I'll not go into detail here, but I'll just discuss my gripe: data.

I expected to see some real data to corroborate Sennett's beliefs, but he offers mainly anecdotes, with lots of literary references (e.g. Homer and Wittgenstein). I can't shake the feeling that the author just used any odd example that popped into his head: he talks about conversations with his teacher, tours his friends gave him of bad Soviet architecture, a badly designed conference center he visited in Atlanta, his experiences learning to play music, and so on. The author just doesn't strike me as being very systematic, his examples seem like they were chosen more because they were convenient than because they were representative. Maybe this is standard practice for sociology books (I don't read too many from this genre) but The Craftsman certainly presents an unfavourable comparison to "Bowling Alone" by Putnam, which is a sociological text that makes an absolutely masterly use of data.

As I said, Sennett's inability or unwillingness to confront data is my biggest gripe with the book. I cannot remember any point at which Sennett had a piece of information that was hard to square with his beliefs; anything contradictory seems to have been ignored. Even when Sennet does mention any data, it is done in little snippets, and it is often wrong. In chapter one alone, Sennet claims that Wikipedia is a Linux application (?), that the British National Health Service spends about 2/3 as much as the US (in fact, the British spend less than half as much as a % of GDP, and even less than that in absolute terms), and that US median earnings rose only 4% between 1973 and 2003 (in fact median real gdp per capita is up about 20% over that time period).

There are other problems (and some good points) but for me the big let-down of the book was that it felt too much like an informal chat (albeit with a very intelligent man). Maybe I just went in with the wrong expectations, but if I could read it again, I wouldn't.

Lovely, heartfelt, smart, and -- though definitely scholarly -- quite accessible. The problem is that there are so many typos, I began to not even trust what I was reading. It's not the fault of the author -- his job is to think hard and write inspired. His copy editor at Yale University Press must have some sense of humor to leave in so many typos to contradict the subject matter of fine craft.

With all the hype I heard about this book, I truly expected much more. This book was anything but a smooth read. The phrasings were awkward and jumpy. There were many typos. There is a typo in the second to last sentence for heaven's sake! Coming out of a hardcover book the first in a series of three, I thought surely the quality would be better.

Once you get past the distracting phraseology and grammatical errors, Sennett does propose and connect some interesting ideas about craft and how it relates to the practices of today. He uses specific historic examples to illustrate the divergence of ancient craft and medley of machine/computer technology available today.

The sources he uses are varied and quite intriguing. I do have to say I did enjoy how he wove ancient and modern philosophies of craft and why it is/is not important to society throughout history. If you can get past the typos and choppy language, it is a good read--you just have to sift through it's somewhat chaotic complexity to get to the gems.

Richard Sennett has been one of my most-preferred interpreters of physical and social culture since Flesh and Stone. He tackles issues that got trampled by misapplications of lit-crit and semiotic theory over the last few decades, and manages to get them back into the discussion. He has a rather dogged style: history, explication, and journalistic fairness are treated like responsibilities in language that is mostly quite dry, even bland. But what he lacks in vivacity, he more than covers with solid, methodical argumentation and a heartening tendency to broaden concepts and include the truly modern. In this volume, for example, Sennett adds Linux programming to the list of what we normally think of as craft, and I think he makes his case. Craft is a wicked thicket for us Moderns: we have not kept pace with its devaluation in an age of competitive production and disposable workers, and the quality of our handwork has suffered, but Sennett also convinces me that our comprehension of the world and the place of humans in it has suffered, because good craft is the meeting of mind and hand. What devalues handwork impoverishes the human mind. We lose our capacity for imagination.

I read this book very closely, pencil in hand, convinced that Sennett has contributed greatly to our understanding of what it means to be human in a machine age. I believe that his work has eclipsed Hannah Arendt's by now. Excellent.

As another reviewer said, Sennett is a deplorable writer. Almost to the point of unreadability. In fact, had I not been reading this book for a class, I'm sure I wouldn't have made it all the way through. Having said that, the man's ideas are extremely interesting and timely. Why his publisher couldn't hire a decent editor to polish his text is a mystery.

But I can't really recommend a book with such poor syntax and such a wandering, nearly imcomprehensible style. I have heard that his health is not good, and perhaps there was a rush for him to finish this; he was supposed to speak to my Media Studies class this fall about craftsmanship but apparently was in the hospital.

What an amazing book. I thought this might be dry, since the book is about craftsmanship. Sennett deals with craftsmanship in so many different realms, not just in terms of building physical objects but also social organizations such as businesses and governments.

There is so much interesting information here that I will need to read this again just to get everything to soak in.