Shop Class as Soulcraft

I really didn't like that book. Shop Class As Soulcraft is a far more lucid treatment of the topic in my opinion.

+1 I thought Shop Class as Soulcraft was excellent and found the author's theories on the lack of job and life satisfaction among those doing "knowledge work" compelling. It reminded me of the movie Margin Call when Kevin Spacey's character, who manages a trading floor for a wall street investment firm, laments that if he'd been a ditch digger, at least he'd have a bunch of holes left behind as evidence he accomplished something.

Two standouts: The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew B. Crawford. This is Crawford's second book, and I recommend his first, Shop Class as Soulcraft, even more highly. This is modern philosophy, intense and grounded in the history and conventions of philosophy, but not unreadable if you're patient. Crawford started working at a Washington think tank, and bailed for a more honest life as a vintage motorcycle mechanic. He walked away from wealth and "success" in favor of ethics and peace. His focus is on the intellectual and moral value of working at a craft, using your hands and your mind in concert to create and maintain things of lasting value. When you work with the physical world, you must shape yourself to the physical world, as much as you bend the physical world to your will. In this book, he talks less about the value of work, and more about the structure of society. It has some fairly extensive critique of the Enlightenment philosophy that molded American government and ethics, and pretty brutal takedowns of many of our institutions today, which he considers wrongheaded and actively interfering with a good life. He'll…

How can there be 71 comments and not one mention of G. K. Chesterton? Go out, right now, and check out The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy from your local library. I would also throw out there Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford, as something to inspire makers & engineers without being a technical book. If you like history, David McCullough's biography John Adams is a masterpiece (also see 1776 by the same author). I can't think of anything else that hasn't already been mentioned.