Salutary Failure
This was a very good, very flawed book. Sennet's ideas are extremely interesting but he is an deplorable writer. He rambles and mixes metaphors regularly, uses obscure anglicisms and archaisms and odd syntax with dismaying frequency. George Orwell he is not. He sites Hannah Arendt as one of his influences, and I seem to recall she was not the most readable writer either.

Amusingly, he mentions that a work of handicraft should be rough, handmade looking... and his prose is all that! It seems to have been written on a tape recorder. He thanks his manuscript editor in the foreword, he should have fired her, there are sentences that make no sense at all, misspellings, and double entendres.
Maybe he did some of this on purpose, like modern art, so the reader would have to slow down and parse every sentence, who knows? He's like an prophet, he needs someone to interpret him in a more accessible way.

Anyway, I loved his ideas, and think this was a very meaningful book for me personally.

Signifigance of Craft
This is not your standard craft book. It is an insiteful analysis of craft as a social and human phenomenon. It explores all aspects of craft from the role of the hand to the historical divergence of craft and art.

What happened to editors?
While I found the contents of Sennett's book interesting and even, at times, uniquely thought-provoking, reading the book left me bewildered and dismayed: How could a book extolling the virtues of quality in craftsmanship be so poorly edited? Is the manner in which the book is published a purposeful counterpoint to Sennett's basic argument? Without exaggeration, almost every page in the book held one or more instances of unaddressed typographical oversight. In truth, the book read like a poor translation from another language possessing idioms and phraseology totally foreign to English. If this is the best that Yale University Press can do, I will certainly question any future purchases bearing that name. For the prospective buyer, be prepared for a disruptive read.

Too much theory, too little fact
There is quite a bit of sociological theory in this book, but that's been discussed by other reviewers, so I'll not go into detail here, but I'll just discuss my gripe: data.

I expected to see some real data to corroborate Sennett's beliefs, but he offers mainly anecdotes, with lots of literary references (e.g. Homer and Wittgenstein). I can't shake the feeling that the author just used any odd example that popped into his head: he talks about conversations with his teacher, tours his friends gave him of bad Soviet architecture, a badly designed conference center he visited in Atlanta, his experiences learning to play music, and so on. The author just doesn't strike me as being very systematic, his examples seem like they were chosen more because they were convenient than because they were representative. Maybe this is standard practice for sociology books (I don't read too many from this genre) but The Craftsman certainly presents an unfavourable comparison to "Bowling Alone" by Putnam, which is a sociological text that makes an absolutely masterly use of data.

As I said, Sennett's inability or unwillingness to confront data is my biggest gripe with the book. I cannot remember any point at which Sennett had a piece of information that was hard to square with his beliefs; anything contradictory seems to have been ignored. Even when Sennet does mention any data, it is done in little snippets, and it is often wrong. In chapter one alone, Sennet claims that Wikipedia is a Linux application (?), that the British National Health Service spends about 2/3 as much as the US (in fact, the British spend less than half as much as a % of GDP, and even less than that in absolute terms), and that US median earnings rose only 4% between 1973 and 2003 (in fact median real gdp per capita is up about 20% over that time period).

There are other problems (and some good points) but for me the big let-down of the book was that it felt too much like an informal chat (albeit with a very intelligent man). Maybe I just went in with the wrong expectations, but if I could read it again, I wouldn't.

Practice What You Preach
You name it; Richard Sennett breaks it down. Metamorphosis provoking material consciousness? (three ways: internal evolution of a type-form, judgment about mixture and synthesis, domain shift). Mirror tools? (two types: replicant and robot). Sennett combines this penchant for analytic break-down with a treasure trove of stories, examples, and experiences, drilling into craft through the finger movements of pianists, the methodology of cookbook Instructions, and much, much more. The Craftsman isn't proof as much as exploration, the perfect platform for a widely read and experienced scholar to play with a vast and varied data set. Even with all that information, The Craftsman comes down to a belief: that craft isn't about things but about values, not about superior skill but about doing a job well for its own sake. Think of it as a theory of sustainable labor in the age of hyper-capitalism.

My BIG GRIPE with this book is that if Richard Sennett believes so much in craftsmanship, why are there so many typos? DOZENS OF TYPOS. Misspellings. Extra words. Here's the end of the second to the last sentence in the book: "the denouement of this narrative is often marked by marked by bitterness and regret." Ya think? If this book was a car, the dealer would be forced by law to replace it. I'm sure Sennett had nothing to do with this, and that he is mortified that his faith in the practice of craft (proofreading, book-making) has been so blatantly betrayed by his publisher (Yale University Press, of the billions in endowment fame), but frankly, reading this book was to experience cynicism of the highest order: A terrible fate for a story so tied to a job well done.