by Andrew Potter ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 13, 2010
A provocative meditation on the way we live now.
Ottawa Citizen politics editor Potter (co-author: Nation of Rebels: How Non-Conformity Drives Our Consumer Society, 2004) argues that the widespread quest for “authenticity” simply exacerbates our discontent with modern life.
A journalist with a doctorate in philosophy, the author writes with authority about the ways in which today’s men and women seek authenticity, or meaning, in their lives—loft-living, ecotourism, yoga, the slow-food movement, etc. Dissatisfied with a world dominated by the fake, the prepackaged and the artificial, they seek “the honest, the natural, the real, the authentic.” But the quest is a hoax, writes Potter. There is no such thing as authenticity, any more than there is an authenticity detector that you could wave at something. Our search for authenticity is a response to the malaise of modernity. Emerging between 1500 and 1800, the worldview of modernity swept away traditional sources of meaning on a tide of secularism, liberalism and the market economy, leaving people with profoundly changed attitudes toward science, religion and personal identity. Potter draws nicely on the writings of Lionel Trilling, on philosophical thought from Rousseau to Diderot and on elements of popular culture from the singer Avril Lavigne to the TV program The Office. He shows how alienation from the ever-changing modern world has prompted several centuries of “rainbow-chasing” after authentic living that is often simply nostalgia for a nonexistent past or disguised status-seeking. For example, the case against suburban living “is little more than lifestyle snobbery disguised as a quest for authenticity.” Potter’s anecdote-filled book explores such topics as art forgery, plagiarism, organic living, fake memoirs, politics and Oprah Winfrey’s “cult of authenticity through therapeutic self-disclosure, of the sort promoted by her frequent guest Dr. Phil.” The author’s discussions of authenticity as a strategy for marketing “vintage” jeans and other goods and as a way of promoting an undiluted cultural past to tourists are especially rewarding. How to avoid the authenticity hoax? Potter writes that we must pursue forms of individualism that make peace with the modern world, with all its benefits and losses.
A provocative meditation on the way we live now.Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-125133-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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by Bari Weiss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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