Crawford, M: World Beyond Your Head The On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

"Crawford's greatest service is to spur our thought, to enjoin his readers to pay attention to the struggle of paying attention. . . . Some of The World Beyond Your Head's individual chapters approach true excellence . . . In Crawford's skillful hands . . . examples are far more than irreverent illustrations of philosophy by pop culture; they are illuminations from within of the many - and often surprising - connections between philosophy and ideology . . . Books like this gather strands of individual experience, cultural malaise, and philosophical reflection, weaving them together to form braided rope whose tensile strength has the power to lead readers forward, onward, and downward - from the personal to the cultural to the political by way of the social." -Charles Clavey, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"The most cogent and incisive book of social criticism I've read in a long time. Reading it is like putting on a pair of perfectly suited prescription glasses after a long period of squinting one's way through life." -Damon Linker, The Week

"[A] brilliant and searching new work of social criticism . . . Crawford proposes a different model of individuality and choice, at once traditional and radically new. Expounding it, with richly informative excursions into neuroscience, experimental psychology, intellectual history, mass culture, skilled crafts, and sports, is the main business of The World Beyond Your Head." -George Scialabba, Boston Review

"It's increasingly difficult to pay attention in the blooming, buzzing confusion of the modern world. Matthew Crawford argues persuasively that it's time to fight back . . . Rather than embracing the standard coffee-mug view of philosophy as a repository of sage aphorisms to be summoned while sipping warm beverages, Crawford respects past thinkers enough both to argue with them and to notice their legacies in diverse cultural strata. He clashes with Kant while considering children's cartoons; he sees an ideal from Kierkegaard lurking behind the generic Muzak at a university gym; he uses Hegel to diagnose the contradictions of New Age concepts of self-realization . . . Crawford offers a compelling general framework for the ethics of attention." -Nick Romeo, The Daily Beast

"Crawford is really part of a long-term philosophical workshop, all of whose apprentices have tried to find better terms for joining the world than what have been offered by their contemporary socioeconomic regimes. Ruskin and Dewey are part of the shop, as are William James and Jane Addams. I am confident they would happily offer whatever their equivalent would be of a vroom-vroom bike-engine sign of acknowledgment. Through philosophy and storytelling, Crawford has joined their project of loosening the grip of alienation and designed inhumanity. That's a job well done." -Michael Roth, The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Educators, politicians, urban planners, interior decorators, and many others would benefit from thinking carefully about the problem Crawford has identified . . . The World Beyond Your Head is an enormously rich book, a timely and important reflection on an increasingly important subject. Pay attention." -Ian Tuttle, The New Criterion

"Crawford's diagnosis of our scatterbrained ennui [is] on target, and [The World Beyond Your Head] is peppered with startling insights. One comes when he contrasts Mickey Mouse cartoons of decades past, in which contraptions invariably break down or assault their owners, to the contemporary universe of 'Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,' where gadgets are error-free servants and faithful friends. It's the kind of technological utopianism that primes a young mind to buy whatever Silicon Valley is selling." -John Keilman, The Chicago Tribune

"In its exploration of how we come to know ourselves, The World Beyond Your Head harks back to vital debates between humanists like Joseph Wood Krutch and the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, as well as later works by t