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  • Published: 9 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241959459
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

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), a hugely ambitious manifesto on mastering our minds

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

Exploring the intense focus of ice-hockey players, the zoned-out behaviour of gambling addicts, and the inherited craft of building pipe organs, Crawford argues that our current crisis of attention is the result of long-held assumptions in Western culture and that in order to flourish, we need to establish meaningful connections with the world, the people around us and the historical moment we live in.

  • Published: 9 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241959459
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

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'

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'

Readers will feel rewarded for spending the time with a text this rich in excellent research, argument, and prose

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

[An] astute, acerbic cultural critique . . . both timely and passionate

Kirkus

Fresh and extremely enlightening. What is most satisfying is that technology is not blamed for the modern deluge of distractions - it is discussed as the cumulative effect of a number of influences found within Western culture. Illuminating

Library Journal (starred review)

A cultural enquiry of rare substance and insight

Booklist (starred review)

Peppered with startling insights

Chicago Tribune

An enormously rich book, a timely and important reflection on an increasingly important subject. Pay attention.

New Criterion

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

Crawford has a point . . . adverts are everywhere, so much so you have to pay to escape. There are real benefits to silence. No great book, or idea comes without a degree of silence. Independent thinking is not possible without it. Perhaps this is why so many corporations and institutions demand our attention - and why we should protect it

Scotsman

Incisive. It's philosophy as an intervention in issues of the day

Chronicle of Higher Education

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

The Week