Libri di Matthew Crawford Migliori da leggere e Consigliati

Le attività pratiche sono ai margini del sistema scolastico e hanno decisamente smesso di accendere la nostra fantasia. I cosiddetti “lavori di concetto” ci sembrano più gratificanti sul piano sociale e intellettuale. Non è quasi mai vero, e Matthew Crawford capovolge proprio questa idea: l’evoluzione del lavoro d’ufficio, in realtà, ha trasformato i “colletti bianchi” in un esercito di frustrati esecutori di direttive altrui. E, soprattutto, li ha privati della possibilità di toccare con mano i benefici concreti della loro attività. All’opposto, i mestieri manuali offrono spazi di libertà e appagamento anche a livello intellettuale e partecipano in modo globale al nostro benessere.

From ‘one of the most influential thinkers of our time’ (Sunday Times): how to respond to today’s demands on our attention In this brilliant follow-up to The Case for Working with Your Hands, Matthew Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one’s own mind. With ever-increasing demands on our attention, and with capitalism increasingly invading every space, how do we focus on what’s really important in our lives? Exploring the intense focus of ice-hockey players, the flow of a cook in their element, and the inherited craft of building pipe organs, Crawford argues that in order to flourish, we need to return to lives where we establish meaningful connections with objects and the people around us.

Why We Drive is a rebellious and daring celebration of the human spirit and the competence of ordinary people by the bestselling author of The Case for Working with Your Hands, ‘one of the most influential thinkers of our time’ (Sunday Times). Once we were drivers, the open road alive with autonomy and adventure. Today we are as likely to be in the back seat of an Uber as behind the wheel. As we hurtle toward a shiny, happy ‘self-driving’ future, are we destined to become passengers in our own lives too? Driving, it turns out, offers a near-perfect embodiment of the broader changes being wrought by government and technology throughout our lives. In Why We Drive, the philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford shows the driver’s seat to be one of the few remaining places where we still regularly take risk, exercise skill and enjoy freedom. But it is here too that we discover what we are losing to automation and the technocrats, and who will profit from the vision of progress they press upon us. Blending philosophy with hands-on storytelling and drawing on his own experience in the garage and behind the wheel, Crawford leads us on an irreverent but deeply considered inquiry into the power of faceless bureaucracies, the importance of questioning mindless rules and the battle for democratic self-determination against the surveillance capitalists. In turn he speaks up for rivalry and play, solidarity and dissent – and the existential value of occasionally being scared shitless. Wry, humane and occasionally hilarious, Why We Drive takes us to the heart of one of the defining questions of our times: who is really in control? ‘One of the most original and mind-opening studies of practical philosophy to have appeared for many years’ John Gray