We begin by peering through a window, watching a carpenter hard at work, engaged, precise, among tools and apprentices. Suddenly, we are glimpsing a lab technician working on rabbit cadavers; next, we are in a concert hall, our eyes keenly directed toward the conductor. We encounter these three craftsmen many times throughout Richard Sennett’s enthralling inquiry into the nature of craftsmanship. Their ranks are joined by ancient weavers, medieval goldsmiths, Linux programmers, brick-builders, luthiers, architects, glassblowers and those who constructed the first atomic bomb.

For Sennett, physical interaction in art, science and everyday life is paramount. His own serious ambitions to become a professional cellist (he began to play at six, performed publicly at the age of thirteen, in his late teens catching the eye of Pierre Boulez, Michel Foucault and others) were thwarted by a botched hand operation when he was nineteen. He went to Harvard instead, slipping easily into the roles of academic and public intellectual, novelist and sociologist, and currently holds professorships at MIT, the London School of Economics and NYU. Sennett has published seventeen books since the 1960s, and cofounded the New York Institute of Humanities, whose first fellows included Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky and Foucault. His best-known work is The Fall of Public Man (1977), which chronicles shifting forms of public and city life.