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    The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
    The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
    The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
    Audiobook9 hours

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

    Written by Matthew B. Crawford

    Narrated by Robert Fass

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateMar 31, 2015
    ISBN9781427260703
    The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
    Author

    Matthew B. Crawford

    Matthew B. Crawford is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head. He is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He earned a PhD in Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago, specializing in ancient political thought; he majored in physics as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara. Crawford has been working on cars since the age of fifteen and currently drives a 1970 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. 

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    Reviews for The World Beyond Your Head

    4/5

    7 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Mixed bag.
    • 3/5
      Some was really interesting (humans are "hard wired" to pay attention to color and motion), some was huh??? (parts of trying to tie it to history), and some was ouch! dreadful! (the bit on gambling). Some was straightforward and logical and some was very hard to follow. Would have been improved by some definitions of terms some people might have already known but many definitely would not.
    • 3/5
      Interesting ... in parts. I enjoyed the first and last parts. Good ideas and philosophy about thinking and learning.