Book club

Note: I have been trying to get soem reading done on this break. Here is a short review of The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers and Inventors who make American Great by Alec Foege. More reviews posted from time to time...

"The Tinkerers" raises an interesting question - what do you expect when you sit down to read a book (as opposed to a magazine article or newspaper feature). Foege was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and senior writer at People and it shows in this under-researched book about a fascinating idea. When he's writing profile pieces - as in chapters on Dean Kamen and Gever Tulley - he's entertaining and pleasantly readable. But when he tries to write about the historical sweep of the topic, his weak storytelling skills get in the way. The chapter contrasting Washington and Franklin and setting them up as paradigms of American tinkering is so meandering as to be pointless.

But more disappointingly, the book suffers from the common sins of the genre of business literature - it's fixation on validating an idea or term (in this case, tinkering) prevents and serious, critical examination of that idea. A quick review of the notes cofirms that Foege got most of his information from business journalism, Wired magazine, the New York TImes and the New Yorker. This explains why is book reads like a second-hand analysis of ideas that have been discussed in these magazines and newspapers.


So what should one expect from a book rather than a magazine article or newspaper feature? A book can go into greater depth and engage more complex sources than these other forms, and I think readers are right to expect such depth and criticality from books. We've seen some very thoughtful writing like that in the last few years, from authors like Glenn Adamson and Richard Sennett (on crafts) and Matthew Crawford (on how changes in the education have affected ideas about work). Sadly, "the Tinkerers" reads like something you'd read on a long flight - a largely superficial attempt to identify a new trend that is principally about trying to stake out that new trend, not thoughtfully analyze it. It's something someone will mention in a meeting or when griping about the state of education in the 21st century, but there's no 'there' there.