The infuriating thing about this book is that when it’s good, and on the things it’s good on, it is very good indeed, and lots of fun besides.

It is disqualified completely, however, by its thorough, fatal lack of attention to those inveterate maintainers known as “women,” acknowledged in its pages only on the dedication page (and even then in a way that isn’t anywhere near as charming as Brand presumably intends).

The disqualifying bits are genuinely disqualifying, i.e. I could not in good conscience recommend this book to anyone. It isn’t simply the erasure of women (though boy *howdy* that’d be sufficient), it’s Stewart’s insistence on larding the text with the occasional, entirely gratuitous comment revealing who he’s become or always was.

That said, “Maintenance” is clearly the result of a writer gifted with a lucid, unpretentious prose style addressing a subject that is important, dear to them, and which they’ve thought deeply and carefully about for many, many years.

That’s the tragedy here. We need a book shaped a lot like this one, but this is not it.

Intimately familiar with the concept of pace layering as he is, Brand correctly notes that different parts or aspects of the book will age at different speeds.

I *strongly* suspect that among the passages that will age most poorly are those celebrating the technical qualities of Tesla cars, which cannot be maintained by users in the usual sense of that word, and are increasingly understood by knowledgeable observers to be deathtraps for their drivers and passengers should they for any reason catch fire.

And then…that’s it. The book kind of just *ends*, without even so much as a STEWART BRAND WILL RETURN IN “RUST IS FOREVER.” (Maybe this is what comes of so prominently labeling the book “Part One”?)

“Maintenance” never quite recaptures the verve of its first section, on the great solo circumnavigators of 1968-1969. It’s weirdly uneven from that point onward, taking in the well-trod (Kalashnikov’s AK-47 v. Stoner’s M16), the interesting but deeply uncomfortable (a long, laudatory bit on the IDF’s improvisational genius in the Yom Kippur War, as opposed to the ostensibly culturally-determined weaknesses of the Egyptian military), and the head-scratchingly weak (you can learn how to fix anything from YouTube! and buy all the parts you need from Amazon!).

You don’t need this book. If you expect to come away from it with the kind of reorienting insights “How Buildings Learn” dispensed on just about every one of its pages, you’ll be disappointed. And you’ll wonder where all the women went.