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Book Reviews

28 October 2009

Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, describes the emotional and cerebral satisfactions of skilled manual labor; it is an attempt to restore dignity to, and propose renewed pedagogical emphasis on, such work in the softer, more circumspect era of the “knowledge economy.” More…

In Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the young sociologist Neil Gross has tried to use Rorty’s intellectual biography—his transformation from a philosopher working primarily within the narrow Anglophone analytic tradition to a digressive, itinerant intellectual on the model of his pragmatist hero, John Dewey—as a case study in an argument against certain kinds of piety. More…