The book investigates a variety of amateurs involved with pursuits from astronomy, to biology and more, acknowledging their unschooled unpaid nature allowed them to pursue things that the professional could not justify and often with greater creativity. Through a number of unique characters the author revealed some interesting efforts going on. ( )

This is that staple of modern publishing: the non-fiction book built around narrative articles written forward popular magazines. But Jack Hitt proves to be a deeper observer and shrewder critic than the average journalist. He knows how language can manipulate and sees as clearly through the jargon of academes as he does through the hyperbolic his amateurs. ( )

Well, it wasn't quite what I was expecting...apart from the synth bio / robotics chapter (which I quite enjoyed).

The chapter on Franklin was a bit blah, not having much to do with invention (when you would suppose there was much fodder there, Franklin being an inventor of several things) but rather, his supposed craziness of character during his time in France. Eh? Whatever.

Then there were great swaths of boring, like the chapter on the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. Really? You're writing a book on amateurs in America and the most interesting thing you can come up with is amateur bird watchers? The chapter was boring, long and repetitive. If he'd have said ONE MORE TIME about the educated northerner being partnered with the colorful backwoods yokel I was going to toss the stupid book out the window!

The only thing that kept this book from one star was the synth bio / robotics chapter and the fact that there were fewer errors in this uncorrected proof copy than there have been in most of the published books I've been reading lately!

The amateur astronomers chapter wasn't too bad. It started out strong, then petered out. But, it was better than most of the rest of the book. ( )

Well, it wasn't quite what I was expecting...apart from the synth bio / robotics chapter (which I quite enjoyed).

The chapter on Franklin was a bit blah, not having much to do with invention (when you would suppose there was much fodder there, Franklin being and inventor of several things) but rather, his supposed craziness of character during his time in France. Eh? Whatever.

Then there were great swaths of boring, like the chapter on the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. Really? You're writing a book on amateurs in America and the most interesting thing you can come up with is amateur bird watchers? The chapter was boring, long and repetitive. If he'd have said ONE MORE TIME about the educated northerner being partnered with the colorful backwoods yokel I was going to toss the stupid book out the window!

The only thing that kept this book from one star was the synth bio / robotics chapter and the fact that there were fewer errors in this uncorrected proof copy than there have been in most of the published books I've been reading lately!

The amateur astronomers chapter wasn't too bad. It started out strong, then petered out. But, it was better than most of the rest of the book. ( )

Let’s get this out of the way: Hitt does almost nothing to suggest that American amateurism is different from anyone else’s amateurism, though he does say it’s part of our self-image. (The quality of his evidence includes this century-hopping comparison of fictional archetypes: “The mad scientists of Europe spawned monsters. Our absentminded professors [don’t get why they’re amateurs, but ok] created flubber ….”) He includes women in his story, but only in more traditionally male amateur pursuits, though his author’s note indicates that he did research fan fiction. His account of the amateur identifies two kinds: “They are either outsiders mustering at some fortress of expertise hoping to scale the walls, or pioneers improvising in a frontier where no professionals exist.” I think that reductiveness has a gendered component. That said, this is a readable book about the wacky and the non-wacky. Hitt covers amateurism as a path to success as well as a path to doing nothing much in particular or even being affirmatively and damagingly wrong: in his example, amateur archeaologists who end up promoting racist narratives about early “Caucasian” migrations to North America. One of these guys decided that a skull he’d found must have looked just like Jean-Luc Picard, and sure enough the facial reconstruction ended up looking just like Patrick Stewart. He “suggested to the artist that he not include the ‘epicanthic fold’ of the Asian eye since leaving that out would be ‘neutral’”—an almost perfect indictment of “neutrality.”

I liked Hitt’s point that we often bemoan the demise of the amateur because some field or other is getting so specialized, but “each generation also discovers that what they thought were very expensive, highly unobtainable technologies suddenly turn into the next generation’s play toys.” Also, did you know that a kid in Michigan became the eighteenth amateur to create nuclear fusion in his backyard?

Hitt is also fun to read about the payoffs from tinkering and failing. Discussing one woman who’s trying to genetically engineer yogurt to do various things (such as glow) in her spare time, he talks about her pleasure in finding older, cheaper ways to carry out parts of the process, and about the encouragement found in small victories when you don’t have a boss with a deadline for one big solution. “Amateurs are often fixing things, their own devices, so there is this constant reinforcement of feeling smart and competent.” Though, he points out, this can also lead to people spending their lives trying to make the one last tweak that will make the perpetual motion machine work. And Hitt emphasizes that amateurs (even the mostly male mechanical tinkerers of common tropes) actually tend to work in packs, cross-pollinating each others’ ideas. ( )