I like the premise of the book and it started strong. Tinkerers are cool! Hey, I'm a tinkerer, too! It brought back memories of my mom pushing me to be more mechanically inclined and tinker with electronics (instead of watching television)... I still consider myself a tinkerer - a tinkerer of spreadsheets.

I did enjoy some of the histories of some of the tinkerers. Maybe I just had different expectations but I don't have a grasp of really what the book is trying to tell me.

It's an OK book. Just one I'm likely to forget in a couple days. ( )

Not terrible, not great, not what I expected. Like other reviewers I've found online, my definition of a tinkerer seems to be completely different from the author's. Except for Foege's story about fixing his own cell phone, there is hardly an amateur or a DIYer in sight for the rest of the book. Inventors, yes, and innovators, who are mostly involved with big government or big business. I was hoping for more information about the sorts of people whose projects get into Make Magazine; and as a librarian, I was hoping to get more background on the sorts of things one might make available in a library's maker space. Instead I found myself reading about the history of the interstate highway system, among other things.

I received an electronic galley of this book for free, but received no other compensation for this review. ( )