The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work Is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good

It's time to rethink our attitudes to work.

For too long we have convinced ourselves that the only jobs worth doing involve sitting at a desk. Generations of school-leavers head for university lacking the skills to fix or even understand the most basic technology. And yet many of us are not suited to office life, while skilled manual work provides one of the few and most rewarding paths to a secure living.

Drawing on the work of our greatest thinkers, from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Karl Marx to Iris Murdoch, as well as on his own experiences as an electrician and motorcycle mechanic, Matthew Crawford's irreverent and inspiring manifesto will change the way you think about work forever.

Matthew Crawford is a philosopher and mechanic. He has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and served as a postdoctoral fellow on its Committee on Social Thought. Currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, he also runs Shockoe Moto, an independent motorcycle repair shop.