Book Review: “Shop Class as Soulcraft”

Although “Shop Class as Soulcraft” was written by a motorcycle mechanic, the inspiring book’s theme is highly relevant for cyclists like me who want to better understand their machines. The book’s author, Matthew B. Crawford, argues that we should be masters of our own stuff. He laments that more and more, we live in a throw-away culture that discourages people from understanding how things work. There’s a decline in tool use that has made us more passive and dependent. An engineering trend has been developing that seeks to “hide the works” from us. Many appliances are now held together by esoteric fasteners that can only be opened with tools not commonly available (This made me think of Campy!). In many new cars, especially German ones, there is a hood under the hood. “The engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the protohumans in the opening scene of the movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’” Crawford says. He notes that consumers in the old days were more demanding. The Sears catalogue contained blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances in case you wanted to fix it yourself.

One of the most interesting things about the book is Crawford’s unusual background. He spent part of his youth with his mother living in a commune, where he learned how to be an electrician. He majored in physics and eventually got a PhD in political philosophy at the University of Chicago. He joined the white-collar world and worked in a think tank in Washington – a job he found extremely unsatisfying. He quit to open his own motorcycle repair shop, Shockoe Moto, in Richmond, Virginia.

I plead guilty to being in the mechanically passive and dependent camp. I’m more of an arts and letters guy with little natural aptitude for fixing things, as my wife constantly reminds me. But I’m changing. (I learned how to true a wheel last weekend.) I no longer want to panic and feel helpless when my bike breaks down, and “Shop Class as Soulcraft (The Penguin Press, 245 pages) further stoked my desire to be a better wrench.

Another thing I like about the book is that it dispelled my stereotype of the mechanically gifted as being people who have an innate understanding of machinery and somehow know how to to easily fix it. Crawford describes in detail the many times he struggled to solve a problem and at times made it worse. It figures into another important theme in the book: Jobs that our new high-tech society have written off as low level, blue collar, grease monkey labor actually require a high level of intellectual ability and a grasp of a vast body of knowledge. There’s a great line in the book where Crawford describes the deep theoretical discussions that fixing a motorcycle frequently inspired between him and his fellow mechanics. He said there’s usually more thinking going on his his shop than in the Washington “think tank” he once worked in.

Some of the chapters in the middle of the book involve some hard slogging, even for a philosophy major like me. To be fair, I usually read the book in bed after a long day, and I could have brought more energy to it in a better setting. But it is an inspiring read for those who want to be better mechanics, and it’s a great pat on the back for those who already have plenty of Some of the chapters in the middle of the book involve some hard slogging, even for a philosophy major like me. To be fair, I usually read the book in bed after a long day, and I could have brought more energy to it in a better setting. But it is an inspiring read for those who want to be better mechanics, and it’s a great pat on the back for those who already have plenty of grease between their fingers.

Listen to Crawford discuss his book here.