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<![CDATA[Joseph added 'Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/75027501
to: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (Hardcover)byMatthew B. Crawford
Crawford has a strong, important message, and I totally buy it: many of the manual trades offer more job satisfaction and mental stimulation than what college graduates are offered in the "knowledge" careers, which are often little more than stressful, unchallenging, cubicle work. He's not only right, but he's making a very important point. But the book only comes alive when Crawford talks about his experiences in stultifying cubicle jobs or rewarding manual trades like his current motorcycle repair business.
Unfortunately, he spends probably half the book quoting dull, academic treatises, and lapses into academic-speak during those passages, for pages at a time. (Random example: "The market ideal of Choice by an autonomous self seems to act as a kind of narcotic that makes the displacing of embodied agency go smoothly, or precludes the development of such agency by providing easier saisfactions." How's that again?) I wish it had been less Heidegger and Aristotle and more Robert Pirsig and Malcolm Gladwell. And the book would have more engaging at half the length.
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<![CDATA[Joseph added 'Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/71341405
to: Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings (Paperback)byLawrence Weschler
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<![CDATA[Joseph added 'Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/71341400
to: Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (Hardcover)byLawrence Weschler
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<![CDATA[Joseph added 'True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48163222
to: True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (Paperback)byLawrence Weschler
Lawrence Weschler has produced two of the best books about artists ever.
This one, about Robert Irwin, is a set of essays based on conversations Weschler had on and off with Irwin over the past 30 years, and the two of them make a wonderful intellectual match.
This new edition issued in 2008 includes lots of color photos (which Irwin didn't permit when the '82 edition came out) and six new chapters.