Volume 55, Number 16 · October 23, 2008
Back to Basics
By Julian Bell
The Craftsman
by Richard Sennett
Yale University Press, 326 pp., $27.50
The Craftsman, Richard Sennett's new book, is a far-roving intellectual adventure. Touching here on the cooking of poulet à la d'Albufera and there on the construction of tunnels, here on Hesiod and there on evolutionary psychology, Sennett's curiosity races across disparate fields of expertise much as an eclipse might sweep over the globe, slicing an unfamiliar path from Brazil, via Egypt, to Mongolia. In part Sennett's project is to draw some conclusions from a polymathic career. To his intimate knowledge of haute cuisine and of cello playing he can add over thirty years as a sociologist known for his influential reinterpretations of class relations, of Western cultural history, and of urban life.
Review, 3860 words
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