This is a great book. It's a serious and scholarly, as well as entertaining appreciation of the kinds of skills and intelligence that go into "blue collar" work. I particularly loved the chapters on carpentry and on welding, but the whole thing is well worth one's time. I think this would be an amazing resource for writing teachers who want to interest "vocational" students in the art of writing. It's a great opportunity to talk about both sets of skills. ( )

I was reading the first chapter of The Mind at Work when I knew I had to write a review. A waitress was describing how she liked it better when she was busy, when tasks started to pile up she would get in the groove and do her best work. I worked for a dozen years as an automobile mechanic and that statement is exactly what I experienced. So much in the book rang true to my twenty-five years of experience in the "unskilled" work world. The co-operation found between workers whose pay is set up to make them competitors, the young carpenters learning their tools so well that they become extensions of their hands, learning to handle the variations in routine jobs like rusted and corroded bolts. Mike Rose gets it that the hands and the mind are connected and that jobs our culture assumes are mindless require a great deal of thought and skill. As someone who abandoned auto repair as a way to make a living because I grew tired of people taking one look at my callused hands and tuning me out, I think that more than just the educators it is aimed at should read this book.
My one issue with the book is a few undocumented quotes. One on page 160 from labor historian David Montgomery I would have liked to look up. Of course what I see as a lack of documentation but that could just be the oversensitivity of an over fifty undergraduate student. ( )