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  • Published: 29 February 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241959442
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.00

The World Beyond Your Head

How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction




From 'one of the most influential thinkers of our time' (Sunday Times): how to respond to today's demands on our attention

In this brilliant follow-up to The Case for Working with Your Hands, Matthew Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind. With ever-increasing demands on our attention, and with capitalism increasingly invading every space, how do we focus on what's really important in our lives?

Exploring the intense focus of ice-hockey players, the flow of a cook in their element, and the inherited craft of building pipe organs, Crawford argues that in order to flourish, we need to return to lives where we establish meaningful connections with objects and the people around us.

  • Published: 29 February 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241959442
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.00

About the author

Matthew Crawford

Matthew Crawford is the author of The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work Is Bad For Us and Fixing Things Feels Good and The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction, which have been translated around the world. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Independent, Wall Street Journal as well as numerous magazines and journals. Matthew is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, lectures internationally and runs a motorcyle repair shop.

Also by Matthew Crawford

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Praise for The World Beyond Your Head

Absolutely superb: elegant, surprising, hard-hitting and very important

Guy Claxton, author of 'Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind'

Both impassioned and profound

Washington Post

Very entertaining . . . [with] many interesting insights

The Times

Crawford makes the crucial point that this is a political problem. The creators of smartphones, social networks designed to hook us, the firms buying ads on escalator handrails and media organizations desperate for your clicks and shares are all helping themselves to something that's ours - the limited resource of our attention - to try to turn a profit

Oliver Burkeman, Guardian

There are now many books reminding us to pay attention but Crawford also reminds us of how we lost attention in the first place - and putting the problem in its historical context makes the case more compelling

Michael Foley, author of 'The Age of Absurdity'