The World Beyond Your Head

[Dave Monroe]

THE WORLD BEYOND YOUR HEAD
On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Matthew B. Crawford
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford
explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as
expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his
brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates
the challenge of mastering one's own mind.
We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by
outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind.
Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon
with the way attention sculpts the self.

Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and
short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts,
the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of
building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is
only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more
comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain
assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds
with human nature.

The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of
common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the
rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our
children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a
book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.

http://us.macmillan.com/theworldbeyondyourhead/matthewbcrawford

Read an Excerpt

http://us.macmillan.com/theworldbeyondyourhead/matthewbcrawford

"Why do so many writers find distraction so scary? The obvious answer
is that they’re writers. For them, more than for other people,
distraction really is a clear and present danger...."

[...]

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-new-theory-of-distraction
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