★★☆☆☆

The new book by Stewart Brand is tackling a subject that’s important to me. The introduction struck a chord:

The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills.

What to do? Here’s a suggestion: Soften the paradox, and the misbehavior it encourages, by expanding the term “maintenance” beyond referring only to preventive maintenance to stave off the trauma of repair—brushing the damn teeth, etc. Let “maintenance” mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.

Ultimately, alas, the book doesn’t really expand on this suggestion. While the volume feels rich and dense in some ways – illustrations, extra commentary, highlights – its surface area ultimately appears to be rather shallow. Ironically, given the subject matter, it feels like Brand fell prey to a bunch of “sexy” stories, some of them only tangentially related to maintenance.

I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.)

We know maintenance tends to be unrewarded and forgotten come promotion time. We know that tedious tasks are often assigned to women and people of color while white men go around doing “genius things.” It’s hard to imagine women not being present in a book about maintenance, and yet – and I wish I was joking – the only woman of any significance in the entire book is… The Statue Of Liberty.

That aside, before opening the book, I hoped it would provide me some vocabulary and evolved thinking about maintenance that I could put to use, and there are some moments where it almost approaches what I wanted from it. Here’s a passage:

Powell credits the Israeli military with a mindset that naturally viewed damaged tanks as soon-to-be-repaired tanks, rather than the irredeemable flotsam of battle. The fact that [Israeli] commanders thought in these terms gave purpose and direction to the maintenance-related technical and tactical skill their crews possessed.

This is fascinating. Tell me how? Tell me what was needed to make it happen? But, unfortunately, outside of some basic tenets of “give the rank and file more freedom to do things” and “embrace improvisation,” the book doesn’t seem to offer more.

Elsewhere, there is this quote:

In almost every plant I worked at, QA was seen as a hindrance to hitting productivity metrics. We never got credit for a well-maintained manufacturing capability, but QA almost always got blamed when things went wrong.

…which, again, felt like a fascinating thread to pull on. But instead of digging deeper, this is left hanging without investigation.

The book doesn’t really have a proper ending with synthesis of what came before, and generally meanders a lot – to a point that the table of contents has more “digressions” than actual subjects. It also feels occasionally rambling and occasionally showing off (name-dropping people like Kevin Kelly and Freeman Dyson, or quotes from “beta-tester” readers that mostly serve to paint Brand in a positive light), which takes away from otherwise brisk writing and at times truly excellent storytelling. (The first chapter in particular is fantastic.)

If you want an easy-to-read, breezy, well-typeset book filled with historical anecdotes, and the above caveats do not bother you, this might be a fun read! But I expected more from it.

The one place where the book shines is pointing people toward other books – there are pages that feel more like literature review (done really well!), and the end matter has bibliography and recommended reading with notes. So in that way, while disappointing in and of itself, it could also become an interesting starting off point for more research.