A powerful and personal account of the meaning and wonder of craft by one of its leading voices. Through a compelling mix of family lore and cultural history, Adamson explores the practice and purpose of craft with elegance and insight

Tristram Hunt, Director, Victoria and Albert Museum

Inspiring . . . Fewer, Better Things is deeply personal, full of stories about Adamson's family that are by turns funny, eye-opening, and moving . . . Adamson invites readers to follow along on a series of thought experiments about the objects in our lives, our relationships to them, what they mean, and how we might go about distilling them so that our material footprint is greatly reduced. And this isn't just an exercise -- the future of humanity might depend on it.

Architectural Digest

[Adamson] makes a powerful case for limiting our purchases to things (including food) that we find to be beautiful, meaningful, or useful.

Psychology Today

Adamson, a former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and author of several books on craft, views the suffering of the natural world through the prism of our increasingly tortured relationship with it.

New York Review of Books

Genial and elegant writing . . . Combining elements of memoir, reportage, material history, and curatorial studies, Fewer, Better Things is an erudite but accessible global survey of the contemporary material landscape and how we can be better informed to shape it . . . For the design-inclined, Fewer, Better Things will sharpen the way you think about the world around you.

Modern Magazine

If we are to navigate out of our cluttered and over-accessorized worlds, we need the kind of critical thinking that Fewer, Better Things beautifully and succinctly delivers. Reflecting a lifetime of study on material intelligence, Glenn Adamson's remarkable book asks us to radically reconsider the objects we choose to surround ourselves with. I thoroughly enjoyed it and can see it becoming a manifesto for modern living.

Alexander Langlands, author of CROEFT: AN INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGINS AND TRUE MEANING OF TRADITIONAL CRAFTS