Currently reading
Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
Operation Greylord: The True Story of an Untrained Undercover Agent and America's Biggest Corruption Bust
Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto
My System: 21st Century Edition
The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love
James Madison: A Biography
The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
This book irritated me to no end. Where one word would suffice, Two were used, and at least one would be a word chosen to impress the reader that this was no ordinary grease monkey, but some kind of warrior-poet....Or, a pretentious twit. In general the book attempts to make both a philosophical and economic case for the applied arts, mainly being some kind of mechanic. I begin the book already firmly on the author's side, but by midway though, I'm through. This smacks to me of a feeling of cultural and educational inferiority, not that he IS, but that he feels as though he is, and thus must dress up his point (which he must also make over..and over...and over) with bonus vocab words which really just make it sound silly, instead of noble. Really, although I completely agree with the point he tries to make, the entire thing is so pompous I couldn't manage to read another word of it. In the spirit of the book, I close with a non-haiku:the arrow, never tried harder.the target, never missed more.the failure, never more earnest.
